# data[].attributes.body
In an article entitled "Lynching in America" from 2021, there was lynchings in America and From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S., according to records maintained by NAACP.  These lynchings were mostly targeted towards black people but others were killed too.  I think that there should have been trails

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

# data[].attributes.body
https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-lynching-america
This article from NAACP talked about all of the history of lynchings that happened. Most were black people. In the article it said that there were black people who were lynched for being accused of something they didn’t even do. In the article they also said that a 17-year old black man was accused of raping a white woman, even though he had nothing to do with it, and he was hunted down and lynched. I agree with the article that he should never have been lynched without a trial.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

# data[].attributes.headline
Civil Rights In America Today - Shyann Young

# data[].attributes.subject
Civil Rights In America Today - Shyann Young

# data[].attributes.body
Published in 2013
Author Oskin, Becky

According to 7 Reasons Americans Still Need Civil Rights Movements these are some of the discriminations going on today in the world. For example, a study has found that there are more blacks in jail today than white people. Blacks have a 3.37% higher chance of being put into jail than whites do. Not only this but there is also a poverty difference between whites and blacks as well. For example in 2010 27.4% of blacks were in poverty but only 9.9% of whites were in poverty. I think there is still discrimination going on in today's world and that we need to change it. Not all people are still treated equally and we should change that.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Racial equality's long fight

(Image credit: Library of Congress)

Fifty years after the March on Washington, persistent gaps remain between blacks and whites. Poverty, unemployment, voting rights and racial disparities in education are still issues today, as they were for those who marched for freedom and jobs in 1963. Today, the mass incarceration of blacks adds to the burden. Here is a brief rundown of reasons experts say the United States still needs the civil rights movement.

Poverty

The poverty rate for blacks is much higher than whites in America. In 2010, 27.4 percent of blacks met the poverty threshold, but only 9.9 percent of non-Hispanic whites did the same, according to the National Poverty Center. The number of children living in poverty is even higher. Only 12 percent of white children live in areas of concentrated poverty, compared with 45 percent of black children, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.

Jobs

Today, though the black middle class has grown to about 10 percent of all black households in the United States, the unemployment rate remains twice that of whites (12.6 percent vs. 6.6 percent in 2012, respectively). The wage gap persists for black men and women, who earned 74.5 percent and 69.6 percent, respectively, of a typical white man's wage in 2010 - a difference of 25 to 30 percent, according to 2011 report from Harvard researchers.

Education

Schools are more segregated now than they were 30 years ago, according to a 2012 study from the Civil Rights Project. And almost 90 percent of segregated African-American and Latino schools experience concentrated poverty, the report found. The cascading effects of inequalities in education extend to college. The national college graduation rate is 57.3 percent, but 44.8 percent for black women and 33.1 percent for black men, the U.S. Department of Education reports.

Health

There are striking and apparent health disparities between African-Americans and whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These include life expectancy, death rates, infant mortality and lack of health insurance. Many blacks also face discrimination in the doctor's office. Studies show that doctors treat black patients differently than whites.

Prison

There are more blacks in the prison system today - in prison or jail, on probation or parole - than in slavery in 1850, according to research by Michelle Alexander, a professor at Ohio State University. The War on Drugs is partly responsible. Blacks are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report.

But even without drugs arrests, blacks are put in prison at rates six times higher than whites, according to the NAACP. Practices such as New York City's controversial stop-and-frisk policy target people with black or brown skin color. In New York City, a federal judge recently found the policy violates minorities' civil rights.

Voting rights

(Image credit: LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto)

Criminal records remove access to voting rights and lead to job, education and housing discrimination. Across the country, 13 percent of black men have lost the right to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. And states are adding new restrictions, such as voter id laws, since the Supreme Court declared a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act unconstitutional in June 2013.

Racial tensions

Whites don't support civil rights for people of color as broadly as in the 1960s, according to surveys and polls. And some whites are indifferent to the racial injustices blacks faces, a Pew Research Center study found. For example, 70 percent of black think they are treated less fairly than whites in dealings with the police. Only 37 percent of whites said the same. Sixty percent of Americans say the country is more divided than 10 years ago, according to a 2013 Atlantic/Aspen Institute American Values survey.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 Reasons America Still Needs Civil Rights Movements

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fifty years after the March on Washington, persistent gaps remain between blacks and whites. Poverty, unemployment, voting rights and racial disparities in education are still issues today, as they were for those who marched for freedom and jobs in 1963. Today, the mass incarceration of blacks adds to the burden.

# data[].attributes.body
In an article from, " History of Lynching in America" The author Derrick Johnson talked about the horror of lynching in America. One of the articles from the text was the lynching of 17 year old Jesse Washington. He was brutally killed in Texas for the assumption of killing Lucy Fryer. Another death was 14 year old Emmet Till. He was killed for flirting with a white women. I agree with the author that these lynchings were horrible because murdering someone for flirting with another girl is wrong.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

# data[].attributes.body
i learned about how the lynchings also include the mental torture. they can tease and torment to further push the poc, people of color, down. and when they are attacked it has been noted that the marked lynchings are not near the true amount many historians say that they can be a few thousand more. the state that has the most marked lynching is Illinois; this made me concerned as we live so close to there.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

# data[].attributes.body
In this article, by "New York Times" published in 2015, I was able to learn about lynchings. I agree that America was unfair to the colored people. Blacks were always being punished for little things. Whites were always trying to get the colored in trouble. More than 4,000 blacks were lynched due to false advertising made by the whites. With all of this information, it makes me upset that white were able to do anything without being punished but blacks were killed for doing nothing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names (Published 2015)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After compiling an inventory of 3,959 lynching victims in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950, the Equal Justice Initiative wants to erect markers and memorials on certain sites.

# data[].attributes.body
What I had read about was the Civil rights movement it took place in the 1950s through the 1960s. In 1870 the 15th Amendment granted Black American men the right to vote. What the story also said was many white Americans in the South were unhappy that people they’d once enslaved were now on a equal playing field. What I thought about this is that the white people shouldn't've cared that they  were being treated the same as they were.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Jim Crow Laws

During Reconstruction, Black people took on leadership roles like never before. They held public office and sought legislative changes for equality and the right to vote.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution gave Black people equal protection under the law. In 1870, the 15th Amendment granted Black American men the right to vote. Still, many white Americans, especially those in the South, were unhappy that people they'd once enslaved were now on a more-or-less equal playing field.

To marginalize Black people, keep them separate from white people and erase the progress they'd made during Reconstruction, " Jim Crow " laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century. Black people couldn't use the same public facilities as white people, live in many of the same towns or go to the same schools. Interracial marriage was illegal, and most Black people couldn't vote because they were unable to pass voter literacy tests.

Jim Crow laws weren't adopted in northern states; however, Black people still experienced discrimination at their jobs or when they tried to buy a house or get an education. To make matters worse, laws were passed in some states to limit voting rights for Black Americans.

Moreover, southern segregation gained ground in 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Plessy v. Ferguson that facilities for Black and white people could be "separate but equal."

World War II and Civil Rights

Prior to World War II, most Black people worked as low-wage farmers, factory workers, domestics or servants. By the early 1940s, war-related work was booming, but most Black Americans weren't given better-paying jobs. They were also discouraged from joining the military.

After thousands of Black people threatened to march on Washington to demand equal employment rights, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. It opened national defense jobs and other government jobs to all Americans regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.

Black men and women served heroically in World War II, despite suffering segregation and discrimination during their deployment. The Tuskegee Airmen broke the racial barrier to become the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps and earned more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Yet many Black veterans were met with prejudice and scorn upon returning home. This was a stark contrast to why America had entered the war to begin with-to defend freedom and democracy in the world.

As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman initiated a civil rights agenda, and in 1948 issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military. These events helped set the stage for grass-roots initiatives to enact racial equality legislation and incite the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks found a seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus after work. Segregation laws at the time stated Black passengers must sit in designated seats at the back of the bus, and Parks complied.

When a white man got on the bus and couldn't find a seat in the white section at the front of the bus, the bus driver instructed Parks and three other Black passengers to give up their seats. Parks refused and was arrested.

As word of her arrest ignited outrage and support, Parks unwittingly became the "mother of the modern-day civil rights movement." Black community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) led by Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr., a role which would place him front and center in the fight for civil rights.

Parks' courage incited the MIA to stage a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. On November 14, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating was unconstitutional.

Little Rock Nine

In 1954, the civil rights movement gained momentum when the United States Supreme Court made segregation illegal in public schools in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas asked for volunteers from all-Black high schools to attend the formerly segregated school.

On September 4, 1957, nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, arrived at Central High School to begin classes but were instead met by the Arkansas National Guard (on order of Governor Orval Faubus) and a screaming, threatening mob. The Little Rock Nine tried again a couple of weeks later and made it inside, but had to be removed for their safety when violence ensued.

Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened and ordered federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to and from classes at Central High. Still, the students faced continual harassment and prejudice.

Their efforts, however, brought much-needed attention to the issue of desegregation and fueled protests on both sides of the issue.

Civil Rights Act of 1957

Even though all Americans had gained the right to vote, many southern states made it difficult for Black citizens. They often required prospective voters of color to take literacy tests that were confusing, misleading and nearly impossible to pass.

Wanting to show a commitment to the civil rights movement and minimize racial tensions in the South, the Eisenhower administration pressured Congress to consider new civil rights legislation.

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting. It also created a commission to investigate voter fraud.

Sit-In at Woolworth's Lunch Counter

Despite making some gains, Black Americans still experienced blatant prejudice in their daily lives. On February 1, 1960, four college students took a stand against segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina when they refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter without being served.

Over the next several days, hundreds of people joined their cause in what became known as the Greensboro sit-ins. After some were arrested and charged with trespassing, protesters launched a boycott of all segregated lunch counters until the owners caved and the original four students were finally served at the Woolworth's lunch counter where they'd first stood their ground.

Their efforts spearheaded peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations in dozens of cities and helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to encourage all students to get involved in the civil rights movement. It also caught the eye of young college graduate Stokely Carmichael, who joined the SNCC during the Freedom Summer of 1964 to register Black voters in Mississippi. In 1966, Carmichael became the chair of the SNCC, giving his famous speech in which he originated the phrase "Black power."

Freedom Riders

On May 4, 1961, 13 " Freedom Riders"-seven Black and six white activists-mounted a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C., embarking on a bus tour of the American south to protest segregated bus terminals. They were testing the 1960 decision by the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia that declared the segregation of interstate transportation facilities unconstitutional.

Facing violence from both police officers and white protesters, the Freedom Rides drew international attention. On Mother's Day 1961, the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, where a mob mounted the bus and threw a bomb into it. The Freedom Riders escaped the burning bus but were badly beaten. Photos of the bus engulfed in flames were widely circulated, and the group could not find a bus driver to take them further. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (brother to President John F. Kennedy) negotiated with Alabama Governor John Patterson to find a suitable driver, and the Freedom Riders resumed their journey under police escort on May 20. But the officers left the group once they reached Montgomery, where a white mob brutally attacked the bus. Attorney General Kennedy responded to the riders-and a call from Martin Luther King Jr.-by sending federal marshals to Montgomery.

On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi. Though met with hundreds of supporters, the group was arrested for trespassing in a "whites-only" facility and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the convictions. Hundreds of new Freedom Riders were drawn to the cause, and the rides continued.

In the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals

March on Washington

Arguably one of the most famous events of the civil rights movement took place on August 28, 1963: the March on Washington. It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.

More than 200,000 people of all races congregated in Washington, D. C. for the peaceful march with the main purpose of forcing civil rights legislation and establishing job equality for everyone. The highlight of the march was King's speech in which he continually stated, "I have a dream..."

King's " I Have a Dream" speech galvanized the national civil rights movement and became a slogan for equality and freedom.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964-legislation initiated by President John F. Kennedy before his assassination -into law on July 2 of that year.

King and other civil rights activists witnessed the signing. The law guaranteed equal employment for all, limited the use of voter literacy tests and allowed federal authorities to ensure public facilities were integrated.

Bloody Sunday

On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.

As the protesters neared the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and dozens of protesters were hospitalized.

The entire incident was televised and became known as " Bloody Sunday." Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another march.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, he took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 several steps further. The new law banned all voter literacy tests and provided federal examiners in certain voting jurisdictions.

It also allowed the attorney general to contest state and local poll taxes. As a result, poll taxes were later declared unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.

Part of the Act was walked back decades later, in 2013, when a Supreme Court decision ruled that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, holding that the constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures were outdated.

Civil Rights Leaders Assassinated

The civil rights movement had tragic consequences for two of its leaders in the late 1960s. On February 21, 1965, former Nation of Islam leader and Organization of Afro-American Unity founder Malcolm X was assassinated at a rally.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room's balcony. Emotionally-charged looting and riots followed, putting even more pressure on the Johnson administration to push through additional civil rights laws.

Fair Housing Act of 1968

The Fair Housing Act became law on April 11, 1968, just days after King's assassination. It prevented housing discrimination based on race, sex, national origin and religion. It was also the last legislation enacted during the civil rights era.

The civil rights movement was an empowering yet precarious time for Black Americans. The efforts of civil rights activists and countless protesters of all races brought about legislation to end segregation, Black voter suppression and discriminatory employment and housing practices.

Sources

A Brief History of Jim Crow. Constitutional Rights Foundation.
Civil Rights Act of 1957. Civil Rights Digital Library.
Document for June 25th: Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry. National Archives.
Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In. African American Odyssey.
Little Rock School Desegregation (1957). The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford.
Rosa Marie Parks Biography. Rosa and Raymond Parks.
Selma, Alabama, (Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965). BlackPast.org.
The Civil Rights Movement (1919-1960s). National Humanities Center.
The Little Rock Nine. National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior: Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site.
Turning Point: World War II. Virginia Historical Society.

Photo Galleries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Civil Rights Movement: Timeline, Key Events & Leaders | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The civil rights movement was a struggle for justice and equality for African Americans that took place mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. Among its leaders were Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Little Rock Nine, Rosa Parks and many others.

# data[].attributes.body
In the article History of Lynching in America found on the NAACP site, it was made in 2021 at some point, doesnt give an exact date. However in this article I found out that lynching is the public killing of an indivuial who has not recieved any dues. However lynching was a violent act that white people used to control blacks in the 19th and 20th centuries, mostly in the south. Lynchings normally evoke images of black women and men hanging from trees, they were tortured while being hung, however some of them were buried alive. From 1882 to 1968 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S. The highest number of lynchings during that time period according to this article was in Mississippi with 581 lynchings, Georgia was 2nd with 531, then Texas was third with 493. However lynchings did not occur in every single state. There were 3,446 or 72% of the people that were lynched that were black. Then some white people were lynched for helping the black people.

While I was reading this article, I didn’t agree with my article. I find lynching just wrong and stupid. I don’t understand why they even came up with the idea. I also don’t believe that the whites should have gotten lynched because they were helping the blacks. But they did because I guess nobody liked the idea of that. But overall I don’t think this was a great article, but it was interesting to understand how lynching happened and why it did.

# data[].attributes.headline
HISTORY OF LYNCHING IN AMERICA - Addison Smith 

# data[].attributes.subject
HISTORY OF LYNCHING IN AMERICA - Addison Smith 

# data[].attributes.body
In the article "History of Lynchings" Lynchings were violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South.Lynchings were often public spectacles attended by the white community in celebration of white supremacy. Photos of lynchings were often sold as souvenir postcards.From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.SThe highest number of lynchings during that time period occurred in Mississippi, with 581 recorded. Black people were the primary victims of lynching: 3,446, or about 72 percent of the people lynched, were Black. But they weren't the only victims of lynching. Some white people were lynched for helping Black people or for being anti-lynching. Immigrants from Mexico, China,Black people were lynched based on accusations of other crimes, including murder, arson, robbery, and vagrancy. And rape Many victims of lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime. They were killed for violating social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect than what white people believed they were owed.

I think that what white people did to black people was very messed up. The whites had no right to do that do black people; they just did it for entertainment. In the video that we watch of all the black people being hung the whites were smiling in the backgrounds of the pictures and that is not ok. Just because white people associated with black people they were also killed by being hung or burned to death. Some states did this and others not at all. There are no recorded lynchings in Arizona, Idaho, Maine, Nevada, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Whites would hang people that were black or associated with blacks because they wanted power over the blacks. Lynchings were often public spectacles attended by the white community in celebration of white supremacy. I think that what whites did to the blacks and people that associated with the black was not ok and we can’t just put it in the past when it has a huge impact on our lives. It will never fully be gone. What they did was horribly wrong

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

# data[].attributes.body
Digital History: Lynching, Digital History

Lynching, by definition, is the practice of publicly executing someone for a crime without due process. Though they were often carried out by angry mobs, police occasionally participated. Most often, Black Americans were lynched by white mobs. These events were often advertised in newspapers, and drew large crowds. Commonly associated with just hangings, lynchings would often include torture before the person was hanged. Often times victims were whipped, lost appendages (fingers, ears, etc.), sexually assaulted, burned, and even shot. Others, instead of being hung, were burned at the stake. After the victim was declared dead, members of the mob would dismember the victim and sell their body parts as keepsakes. Pictures of large crowds smiling and laughing were often published in newspapers and sold as postcards. An estimated 4,742 lynchings took place between the years of 1882 and 1968.

I was shocked by the torture people would go through before being hanged, because the torture is not often talked about. Something that disturbed me thoroughly was that body parts of the victims were sold as keepsakes. Because of this article, I would like to continue to read about lynchings because I feel as though it would do good for me to educate myself more about this topic. With education comes knowledge, and with that knowledge I can at least try to prevent atrocities like this from happening again.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sam Holt...was burned at the stake in a public road.... Before the torch was applied to the pyre, the Negro was deprived of his ears, fingers, and other portions of his body.... Before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits, and even the tree upon which the wretch met his fate were torn up and disposed of as souvenirs. The Negro’s heart was cut in small pieces, as was also his liver. Those unable to obtain the ghastly relics directly paid more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them. Small pieces of bone went for 25 cents and a bit of liver, crisply cooked, for 10 cents.

# data[].attributes.body
I read the "HISTORY OF LYNCHING IN AMERICA" by NAACP website in 2021 sometime. Lynching is the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. Lynching in the 19th and 20th centuries were whites terrorizing blacks. From 1882 to 1968 there were a totally lynching of 4,743 in the United States and some of the lynchings were not recorded. A lot of blacks were lynched because accusations of other crimes, including murder, arson, robbery, and vagrancy. I disagree with this last statement because blacks should not be blamed for everything they do and sometimes the whites blame the blacks for what they did. I also disagree that there are more lynchings than 4,743 because there were more blacks blamed for things.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

# data[].attributes.body
In an article from 2021 entitled “History of Lynchings in America” by NAACP, the text tells me that there were about 4,000 or more lynchings that happened in the span from 1882 to 1968, this is just an estimate, but there could have been many more. Lynchings are not just hangings that have happened, lynchings are the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. People think that hangings are a thing of the past, but really some are still happening now. I was surprised that there are still lynchings to this day and things like this are still being allowed to happen. Because of this article, I would like to continue reading about lynchings and what kind of lynchings are happening nowadays.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
History of Lynching in America - NAACP 2021

# data[].attributes.body
My article is saying that the lynchings have been going on for long time. Also it states how lynching still happens today (Ex. George Floyd). It describes all the bad things. Some of the things that people have said is them trying to make it seem legal because the people make something up that the person they did it too did even thought they may bend it on how they say it to make it seem like it was fine to do it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

# data[].attributes.body
From the article "HISTORY OF LYNCHING IN AMERICA" found on the NAACP site wrote in 2021 I learned...From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S the target was mostly black people and those counted up to be 3,446, or about 72 percent of the people lynched. The article states "A common claim used to lynch Black men was perceived sexual transgressions against white women." this was the way because people thought it was wrong for black men to be with white women.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

# data[].attributes.headline
Black Communities and Natural Disasters - Addison L

# data[].attributes.subject
Black Communities and Natural Disasters - Addison L

# data[].attributes.body
PBS Civil Rights Today

Jenkins, Alan. Interview by Maria Daniels, WGBH Boston, July 2006.

From this article I learned that black communities are still discriminated against to this day. Black communities were purposefully made to be farther away from good jobs, schools, hospitals, and the hardest to get out in case of emergency. Hurricane Katrina ruined these communities the most. I think this is extremely unfair. I think that these communities should be as good as the white communities that get access to all of these.

# data[].attributes.headline
Civil Rights, NOT History Just Yet -Hali K.

# data[].attributes.subject
Civil Rights, NOT History Just Yet -Hali K.

# data[].attributes.body
By Danyelle Solomon, Connor Maxwell, and Abril Castro August 7, 2019

Civil rights is not history just yet people. Currently in this day and age, everyday peoples’ civil rights are being threatened. In 2018 Donld Trump was threatening these rights. President Trump has spent much of his first term in office attempting to prohibit Muslims from entering the United States; separating children of color from their parents and placing them in cages along the southern border; and trying to undermine the asylum process for women of color fleeing domestic violence. While such a threat is racist, xenophobic, and constitutionally dubious, it stokes fear in millions of Americans of color. A new generation of civil rights leaders now focuses its work on eliminating social and economic disparities, particularly for the indigent. Using some of the sixties strategies for community organizing around advocacy and service delivery, these leaders are bringing technical proficiency to such complex problems as economic development, improvement of schools, and the organization of community development corporations whose missions range from building housing to creating mini-industries.

I think that civil rights issues will never stop. Our democracy is failing and I think our country is too arrogant to see the problems it has. This is only my opinion and what I believe. I believe everyone has a right and that our country needs to face facts and change to address this situation.

# data[].attributes.body
According to Disturbing photos of the modern-day Ku Klux Klan By Elisha Fieldstadt August 4, 2016 / 2:00 PM / CBS NEWS, when most people think about the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) they think of them terrorizing blacks in the south back almost a hundred years ago. But that is not true. The KKK is still around and it is all over the United States of America. The KKK made a comeback after president Donald Trump was elected and they went from 5,000 known members to 8,500 members from 2015 to 2017. They are making a comeback but they have a new look as a peaceful organization and not to terrorize blacks. They have had many marches and rallies that have had a lot of people scared and angry. Will the Klan continue to grow, we don't know but what we do know is that they are still around today and they are making a terrifying comeback.

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-kkk-today/2/

Ty Thomas

# data[].attributes.headline
Share your learning from your research about civil rights and/or the history of lynchings. -Mrs. Hartwig

# data[].attributes.subject
Share your learning from your research about civil rights and/or the history of lynchings. -Mrs. Hartwig

# data[].attributes.body
For today's purposes, make sure to do the following in your post:

1. Create your own unique title in the subject line, followed by your first name.

2. Reference and hyperlink your favorite text by identifying the "title," Author, and date of publication. (In the article entitled “Remember to Capitalize Your Title” by FirstName LastName on Date,… or According to “Remember to Capitalize Your Title” by FirstName LastName on Date, ...)

3. Compose a more complete summary of the text in order to share the main points about your topic with your readers.

4. Then compose your analytical commentary by explaining the conversation you had with your text (the thought journey you went on) during your reading.

# data[].attributes.headline
The history of Lynching and how bad is really was. - Jacob

# data[].attributes.subject
The history of Lynching and how bad is really was. - Jacob

# data[].attributes.body
https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-lynching-america
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/video/origins-lynching-culture-united-states

My articles are on how bad lynching and slavery were. The
legal definition of lynching is when three or more persons, which constitute a mob, put someone to death extralegally, without court sanction, without legal sanction, and they do it for the purpose of tradition and/or whatever their version of justice is. I learned that lynching started in the earlier 1830s - the late 1870s there were about 4,000 lynches through that time span but There are no recorded lynchings in Arizona, Idaho, Maine, Nevada, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin. While The highest number of lynchings during that time period occurred in Mississippi, with 581 recorded. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493. I feel that lynchings should've never happened and that if we had not been racist from the beginning we could've become a more united country.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Origins of Lynching Culture in the United States

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Paula Giddings, professor of Afro-American Studies at Smith College, discusses the history and origins of lynching.

# data[].attributes.body
“Guides: A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States: Introduction” written by the Georgetown University Law Library on August 26, 2021

Human rights are rights that one has just by being alive, such as the right to life, education, protection from torture, freedom of expression, and the right to a free trial.  Civil rights include protection from discrimination, the right to free speech, the right to due process, the right to equal protection, and the right against self-incrimination.

“Civil Rights Movement: Timeline, Key Events & Leaders - HISTORY” from history.com editors, original written on October 27, 2009, updated on May 17, 2021

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution gave Black people equal protection under the law. In 1870, the 15th Amendment granted Black American men the right to vote. Still, many white Americans, especially those in the South, were unhappy that people they’d once enslaved were now more-or-less equal in that way.

Black men and women served heroically in World War II, despite suffering segregation and discrimination during their deployment.  As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman initiated a civil rights agenda, and in 1948 issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military.  All of these events helped set the stage for the civil rights movement.

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting.

One of the most famous events of the civil rights movement took place on August 28, 1963: the March on Washington. It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders. The highlight of the march was King’s speech in which he continually stated, “I have a dream…”

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, he took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 several steps further. The new law banned all voter literacy tests and provided federal examiners in certain voting jurisdictions.

I’ve learned a lot from these two articles about many events that helped to shape how civil rights became available to all.  Many people fought for civil rights for their whole lives.  I’m glad that we’ve become better in protecting and respecting everybody’s civil rights.  I feel like we have come so much closer to equality for all and that it is an amazing accomplishment.

-Emmarae Ellis

# data[].attributes.body
The article entitled “How white Americans used lynchings to terrorize and control black people”, written by Jamiles Lartey and Sam Morris in April of 2018, talks about how the lynching was legal and all of the whites just loved it. It was also talking about the people that showed up to watch and there were familys who brought their kids that were as young as two. One of the last things that really stood out to me in this article is when they said the officers would help them, and if they knew there would be a lynching on that day they wouldn’t watch the blacks cells so people could take them. A lot of this suprised me but at the same time it didn’t, because I just knew about everything happening back then. I was just confused as to why someone would want to bring their kid to something like this and have them watch it. Another thing that realy confused me was why, people were always so happy about these, like in all of the pictures all of the people that came to watch were just having the time of their lives, as someone else was getting killed. The last thing that I thought was weird was how the police officers would just let them do this, and purposefully not watch the cells on those days so they would die.

# data[].attributes.body
According to US Black-White inequality in 4 charts by Tami Luhby and Christopher Hickey, published onJune 1, 2021 racial injustice in our society is one of the biggest problems that we face today. There are many disparities between blacks and whites such as pay, poverty, and unemployment in the U.S. The income gap between blacks and whites is, on average, 76,000, to 45,000 dollars. The unemployment rates between white and black is double for blacks. The last thing is that almost 20% of blacks live in poverty, compared to the 7% of whites who live in poverty. I was surprised at how large the gaps were between blacks and whites. I’m curious to why this is, and would like to find out more.

# data[].attributes.body
In the article entitled The Ku Klux Klan by the Southern Poverty law center I learned about the history of the KKK. The KKK is a hate group that was established after the Civil war.
Confederate veterans joined to form a group that would ultamitley not let African Americans have any rights. If any African American gained any form of speech or power the KKK would hold lynchings for them. As soon as the Jim Crow laws came the Klan abandoned. But later on in 1915 they came back to target Catholic and Jewish Immigrants. The Klan evolved gathering more Racist and even Nazis. The Klan started targeting the LGBTQ community no so long after.
To this day, the Klan is still active and the state with the most Klans is Tennessee with 4 Klans
I think that the KKK is a terrible group that terrorizes people of different backgrounds, The KKK should be ended even though it will be very hard to.

# data[].attributes.headline
7 WAYS AMERICAN RACISM IS ‘ALIVE AND WELL’- Jayla

# data[].attributes.subject
7 WAYS AMERICAN RACISM IS ‘ALIVE AND WELL’- Jayla

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.futurity.org/7-factors-racism-united-states-2384462/

According to 7 WAYS AMERICAN RACISM IS ‘ALIVE AND WELL’ TODAY by Sandra Feder-Stanford on June 12, 2020, there are 7 factors that racism is still alive. Some of them are categories, which organize people into distinct groups, factions, which trigger ingroup loyalty and intergroup competition, and segregation, which hardens racist perceptions, preferences and beliefs. She also states that studies demonstrating how exposed a child is to racial groups will have an effect later on in life. Media is another way which minimises people of color.

I agree with this article because all of these ways are still around today. We shouldn’t need these categories or factions in life. I do think that growing up with racial groups would help you in the future but that’s not to say that people who don’t are bad people. I also think media plays a big role in racism and other factors as well.

# data[].attributes.headline
Today's Civil Rights Issues-Jathan South

# data[].attributes.subject
Today's Civil Rights Issues-Jathan South

# data[].attributes.body
In the article entitled, “6 Civil Rights Struggles Going On Right Now,” by Alia Hoyt, published February 19, 2021, I learned about how racial injustice is still going on today. First of all, this article talked about how even though slavery is abolished, human trafficking is still going on today. This article also talked about how police brutality is still going on today, and 9% of all people shot by police were unarmed black men.

I agree that we still have a long way to go before racism is completely fixed, but that idea is almost impossible. I also agree that the police brutality rates towards unarmed black people is way too high, and needs to be fixed somehow. I also think that human trafficking is completely unacceptable, and should be a main focus for the U.S. to try to prevent.

# data[].attributes.body
I read about the lynchings and I think that there are definitely a lot less people killed now then there were. Currently lynchings are illegal but weren't at the time. Lynchings were basically something that a family might go to on the weekend but now they're illegal and people shouldn't want to watch them. The article was written by Jamiles Lartey and Sam Morris, and my thoughts while reading this article were that people really liked to kill back then.

# data[].attributes.body
In the article entitled “How white Americans used lynchings to terrorize and control black people” by Jamiles Lartey and Sam Morri on Thursday 26 Apr 2018. I learned a lot about lynching from this article. Like when they did lynch it was for either murder or sexual assault. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, nearly 25% of lynching victims were accused of sexual assault. Nearly 30% were accused of murder. We all know they mostly lynched black people but sometimes they would lynch white people for fighting racism. Unsurprisingly, lynching was most concentrated in the former Confederate states, and especially in those with large black populations. Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana had the highest statewide rates of lynching in the United States. Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana had the highest number of lynchings. Among the most unsettling realities of lynching is the degree to which white Americans embraced it, not as an uncomfortable necessity or a way of maintaining order, but as a joyous moment of wholesome celebration. I was not surprised by this behavior because it had always been just whites it could not be blacks either.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Far We've Come, How Far We Have To Go...-Hannah Muller

# data[].attributes.subject
How Far We've Come, How Far We Have To Go...-Hannah Muller

# data[].attributes.body
In the article How far we have come, how far we have to go I learned a lot about civil rights issues today. In the article it talked about how blacks are still discriminated today and still are treated unequally compared to whites. One of the examples and facts I found shocking was that 40% of white people said that if a black family moved in next to them they would move. In 1964 only 18% percent of white people claimed to have a white friend, today 86% claim to be friends. Still today when people think of blacks they think of them as living in ghettos and being involved with crime. But in reality there are more people that are middle class or above that out number the ones below poverty line. While reading this article I got a better understanding of what people think of black people. I had thought that we had changed more but after looking at the facts and percentages it changed my mind.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black Progress: How far we've come, and how far we have to go | Brookings

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brookings Review article by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom (Spring 1998)

# data[].attributes.body
The article "History of Lynching in America" is about the history of lynching’s in the Unites States. A lynching is the killing of any individual that has not received any due process. These lynchings were mainly carried out by mobs, and law enforcement did not participate. From the years 1882 to 1968 there were 4,743 recorded lynchings. The state with the most lynchings, 581, was Mississippi. Black people accounted for 72 percent of all these lynchings. One of the most gruesome lynchings was the lynching of Mary Turner. She was trying to deny that her husband had been involved in a murder. They tied her up to a tree from her ankles, covered her in gasoline, and lit her on fire. While she was still alive they cut open her stomach and an unborn baby fell out, which they proceeded to stomp on.

I was shocked that they would lynch somebody for no proven reason. The fact that there was 3,446 blacks lynched, shows the severity of racism back then.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.

# data[].attributes.body
According to “Lynching In America”, by PBS on 2021 lynching in america was an act of terror meant to spread fear against blacks. It maintained the purpose of keeping white supremacy. Yes, lynching was a thing before slavery, but it became a more common thing during reconstruction. Lynches were usually a public display that anyone could see. People watched and sometimes even had smiles on their faces. They were all over newspapers and the amount of victims to lynching was unbelievable. Only about ¼ of the lynchings that happened were considered rape. While I was reading this article I could not even fathom what it would be like. Killing people just because the color of their skin is right out wrong. I feel bad for all the people and there family members who lost family members or their own lives. The fact that people stood around watching and smiling made me mad. No one should think this action is right and okay to do. I felt horrible while reading this article because nobody should have to go through anything like this.

# data[].attributes.body
In the article entitled Racial Justice by Ashley Landis on May 31, 2020 tells me about one civil right issue going on still today. I read some interesting information about some civil rights. One civil right issue was racial justice. Since the George Floyd incident occurred in last year of May, there have still been more things that happen like that today. Things like protests were happening, but don’t happen as much as they were then. Besides racism against blacks it happens against other races as well. The article reads that asians had felt racially attacked because of the outbreak of covid. They felt discriminated against.

When I read this article today, I already knew most of this information to be honest. But this article was also published during last year when covid was a very broad topic and the George Floyd incident was as well. I don’t have an opinion really, I feel that racially inclined things happen all the time and nothing really changes. This is an interesting topic though.

# data[].attributes.body
In the article (see either the thumbnail above or the text below it for the title), this explains why the struggle for freedom during the Civil Rights era involved lynchings. Nearly 5,000 lynchings occurred in the United States between the Civil War and World War II. Buildings were destroyed. People, regardless of their race, gender or religion, were decapitated, dismembered, shot, mutilated, assaulted, tortured, burned, beaten, hanged and raped. People were called lots of harsh names, such as: "cowards", "jackasses", and "damn yellow niggers from Hell", just to name a few. Even young boys were referred to as "niggers". A young boy was described as going to his very first lynching when he was only nine years old. That's just how gruesome and shocking these acts of brutal, bloody violence were. I mean, this would have to be far less than what mainstream audiences would see in a modern horror movie that has lots and lots of jump-scares, and gore. Though, in accordance with today's standards, back then, the profane language used was appropriate, compared to the more explicable choice words of which the vast majority of adults use today. Mobs, gangbangers, and even violent ex-cons, all took part in all of this death and destruction. People were lynched, regardless of whether they committed such a heinous crime or not. Crimes that black and white people were lynched for include murder, armed robbery, arson, and more. Severed body parts and burnt flesh were even used as "souvenirs". Very sad, indeed. But, thanks to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), these deadly sins eventually became less of an issue. And so, all of this is why I have decided to go with this topic. Although, this is a very disturbing factor of civil rights, schools across the country should know that if it weren't for the heroic people at the NAACP, our nation would have continued to fall apart.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Maya Angelou, On the Pulse of Morning

During the period between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized Black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. These lynchings were terrorism. "Terror lynchings" 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.

Lynching profoundly impacted race relations in this country and shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today. Terror lynchings fueled the mass migration of millions of Black people from the South into urban ghettos in the North and West throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Lynching created a fearful environment where racial subordination and segregation was maintained with limited resistance for decades. Most critically, lynching reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed in America. The administration of criminal justice in particular is tangled with the history of lynching in profound and important ways that continue to contaminate the integrity and fairness of the justice system.

This report begins a necessary conversation to confront the injustice, inequality, anguish, and suffering that racial terror and violence created. The history of terror lynching complicates contemporary issues of race, punishment, crime, and justice. Mass incarceration, excessive penal punishment, disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, and police abuse of people of color reveal problems in American society that were framed in the terror era. The narrative of racial difference that lynching dramatized continues to haunt us. Avoiding honest conversation about this history has undermined our ability to build a nation where racial justice can be achieved.

In America, there is a legacy of racial inequality shaped by the enslavement of millions of Black people. The era of slavery was followed by decades of terrorism and racial subordination most dramatically evidenced by lynching. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s challenged the legality of many of the most racist practices and structures that sustained racial subordination but the movement was not followed by a continued commitment to Consequently, this legacy of racial inequality has persisted, leaving us vulnerable to a range of problems that continue to reveal racial disparities and injustice. EJI believes it is essential that we begin to discuss our history of racial injustice more soberly and to understand the implications of our past in addressing the challenges of the present.

Lynching in America is the second in a series of reports that examines the trajectory of American history from slavery to mass incarceration. In 2013, EJI published Slavery in America, which documents the slavery era and its continuing legacy, and erected three public markers in Montgomery, Alabama, to change the visual landscape of a city and state that has romanticized the mid-nineteenth century and ignored the devastation and horror created by racialized slavery and the slave trade.

Over the past six years, EJI staff have spent thousands of hours researching and documenting terror lynchings in the twelve most active lynching states in America: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. We have more recently supplemented our research by documenting terror lynchings in other states, and found these acts of violence were most common in eight states: Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

We distinguish racial terror lynchings-the subject of this report-from hangings and mob violence that followed some criminal trial process or that were committed against non-minorities without the threat of terror. Those lynchings were a crude form of punishment that did not have the features of terror lynchings directed at racial minorities who were being threatened and menaced in multiple ways.

We also distinguish terror lynchings from racial violence and hate crimes that were prosecuted as criminal acts. Although criminal prosecution for hate crimes was rare during the period we examine, such prosecutions ameliorated those acts of violence and racial animus. The lynchings we document were acts of terrorism because these murders were carried out with impunity, sometimes in broad daylight, often "on the courthouse lawn." These lynchings were not "frontier justice," because they generally took place in communities where there was a functioning criminal justice system that was deemed too good for African Americans. Terror lynchings were horrific acts of violence whose perpetrators were never held accountable. Indeed, some public spectacle lynchings were attended by the entire white community and conducted as celebratory acts of racial control and domination.

KEY FINDINGS

1. Racial terror lynching was much more prevalent than previously reported. EJI researchers have documented several hundred more lynchings than the number identified in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date. The extraordinary work of E.M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay provided an invaluable resource, as did the research collected at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama. These sources are widely viewed asthe most comprehensive collection of research data on the subject of lynching in America. EJI conducted extensive analysis of these data as well as supplemental research and investigation of lynchings in each of the subject states. We reviewed local newspapers, historical archives, and court records; conducted interviews with local historians, survivors, and victims' descendants; and exhaustively examined contemporaneously published reports in African American newspapers. EJI has documented 4084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, which is at least 800 more lynchings in these states than previously reported. EJI has also documented more than 300 racial terror lynchings in other states during this time period.

2. Some states and counties were particularly terrifying places for African Americans and had dramatically higher rates of lynching than other states and counties we reviewed. Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, and Louisiana had the highest statewide rates of lynching in the United States. Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana had the highest number of lynchings. Lafayette, Hernando, Taylor, and Baker counties in Florida; Early County, Georgia; Fulton County, Kentucky; and Lake and Moore Counties in Tennessee had the highest rates of terror lynchings in America. Phillips County, Arkansas; Lafourche and Tensas parishes in Louisiana; Leflore and Carroll counties in Mississippi; and New Hanover County, North Carolina, were sites of mass killings of African Americans in single-incident violence that mark them as notorious places in the history of racial terror violence. The largest numbers of lynchings were found in Jefferson County, Alabama; Orange, Columbia, and Polk counties in Florida; Fulton, Early, and Brooks counties in Georgia; Caddo, Ouachita, Bossier, Iberia, and Tangipahoa parishes in Louisiana; Hinds County, Mississippi; Shelby County, Tennessee; and Anderson County, Texas.

3. Racial terror lynching was a tool used to enforce laws and racial segregation-a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community, not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime. Our research confirms that many victims of terror lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime; they were killed for minor social transgressions or for demanding basic rights and fair treatment.

4. Our conversations with survivors of lynchings show that terror lynching played a key role in the forced migration of millions of Black Americans out of the South. Thousands of people fled to the North and West out of fear of being lynched. Parents and spouses sent away loved ones who suddenly found themselves at risk of being lynched for a minor social transgression; they characterized these frantic, desperate escapes as surviving near-lynchings.

5. In all of the subject states, we observed that there is an astonishing absence of any effort to acknowledge, discuss, or address lynching. Many of the communities where lynchings took place have gone to great lengths to erect markers and monuments that memorialize the Civil War, the Confederacy, and historical events during which local power was violently reclaimed by white Southerners. These communities celebrate and honor the architects of racial subordination and political leaders known for their belief in white supremacy. There are very few monuments or memorials that address the history and legacy of lynching in particular or the struggle for racial equality more generally. Most communities do not actively or visibly recognize how their race relations were shaped by terror lynching.

6. We found that most terror lynchings can best be understood as having the features of one or more of the following: (1) lynchings that resulted from a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; (2) lynchings in response to casual social transgressions; (3) lynchings based on allegations of serious violent crime; (4) public spectacle lynchings; (5) lynchings that escalated into large-scale violence targeting the entire African American community; and (6) lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and community leaders who resisted mistreatment, which were most common between 1915 and 1940.

7. The decline of lynching in the studied states relied heavily on the increased use of capital punishment imposed by court order following an often accelerated trial. That the death penalty's roots are sunk deep in the legacy of lynching is evidenced by the fact that public executions to mollify the mob continued after the practice was legally banned.

The Equal Justice Initiative believes that our nation must fully address our history of racial terror and the legacy of racial inequality it has created. This report explores the power of truth and reconciliation or transitional justice to address oppressive histories by urging communities to honestly and soberly recognize the pain of the past. As has been powerfully detailed in Sherrilyn A. Ifill's extraordinary work on lynching , there is an urgent need to challenge the absence of recognition in the public space on the subject of lynching. Only when we concretize the experience through discourse, memorials, monuments, and other acts of reconciliation can we overcome the shadows cast by these grievous events. We hope you will join our effort to help towns, cities, and states confront and recover from tragic histories of racial violence and terrorism and to improve the health of our communities by creating an environment where there can truly be equal justice for all.

As the Civil War dragged on, however, increasing numbers of enslaved African Americans fled slavery to relocate behind Union lines, and the cause of emancipation became more militarily and politically expedient. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation,4 which declared enslaved people residing in the rebelling Confederate states to be "then, thenceforward, and forever free."5 The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the roughly 425,000 enslaved people living in Tennessee, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland-states that had not seceded or were occupied by Union forces.

Formal nationwide codification of emancipation came in December 1865 with ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery throughout the United States Several states continued to symbolically resist into the twentieth century: Delaware did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1901; Kentucky ratified in 1976; and Mississippi ratified in 1995.9

At the Civil War's end, Black autonomy expanded but white supremacy remained deeply rooted. The failure to unearth those roots would leave Black Americans exposed to terrorism and racial subordination for more than a century.

PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION

President Johnson also opposed Black voting rights. During , whites of diverse political affiliations declared voting a "privilege" rather than a universal right, and even some whites who had opposed slavery were wary of measures that would lead to Black voting in the North.In his 1867 annual message to Congress, President Johnson declared that Black Americans had "less capacity for government than any other race of people," that they would "relapse into barbarism" if left to their own devices, and that giving them the vote would result in "a tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed.14 Johnson believed Black people were inherently servile and unintelligent; he feared they would vote as instructed by their former masters, reestablishing the power of the planter class and relegating poor white farmers to virtual slavery.15 Johnson made little effort to disguise his racist views. 16" Not surprisingly, under President Johnson, federal Reconstruction efforts to support and enforce Black Americans' citizenship rights and social and economic freedom went largely unsupported and unrealized.

Less than three months later, in New Orleans, a group of African Americans-many of whom had been free before the Civil War-attempted to convene a state constitutional convention to extend voting rights to Black men and repeal racially discriminatory laws known as When the delegates convened at the Mechanics' Institute on July 30, 1866, groups of Black supporters and white opponents clashed in the streets. The white mob began firing on Black marchers, indiscriminately killing convention supporters and unaffiliated Black bystanders. Rather than maintain order, white police officers attacked Black residents with guns, axes, and clubs, arresting many and killing several. By the time federal troops arrived to suppress the white insurgency, as many as forty-eight Black people were dead and two hundred had been wounded.18

PROGRESSIVE RECONSTRUCTION

The Memphis and New Orleans attacks, which occurred just before the midterm elections of 1866, sparked national outrage outside the South and mobilized voters to support the progressive platform advocating expansive rights and protections for African Americans. Republicans won a landslide victory in the 1866 congressional races, gaining a veto-proof majority and control of the legislative agenda.19 Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania then led the progressive caucus in devising an ambitious civil rights program broader than anything Congress would attempt for another century.

First, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared Black Americans full citizens entitled to equal civil rights.20 President Johnson vetoed the bill, but Congress-for the first time in United States history-overrode the veto.21 Next, the progressive Republican supermajority quickly passed the Fourteenth Amendment. Intended to eliminate any doubt about the constitutionality of civil rights, the proposed amendment established that all persons born in the country, regardless of race, were full citizens of the United States and the states in which they resided, entitled to the "privileges and immunities" of citizenship, due process, and the equal protection of the law.22 If ratified, the amendment would supersede the United States Supreme Court's 1857 decision in , which held that African Americans were not citizens and had no standing to sue in federal court.23

WHITE BACKLASH: THE KU KLUX KLAN AND THE REIGN OF TERROR

Occupation by federal troops restrained this violence but did not eliminate racial attacks or the commitment to white supremacy that fueled them. The political movement to restore white dominance in the South following the Civil War was termed Redemption and its advocates, called Redeemers, were staunchly opposed to progressive Republicans and Black citizenship rights.36 This set up a tense conflict. As Black people became voters with significant political power, especially in states and counties where they constituted majorities, disputed elections often devolved into bloody massacres.

In the face of Black political and economic competition created by emancipation and progressive Reconstruction, white backlash worked to re-impose white dominance through violent repression.37 In 1868, white Democrats angered by growing Black support for white Republican candidates in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, terrorized the local Black community in two weeks of attacks that left more than a hundred Black people dead.38 In 1873, after a very close gubernatorial election, a militia of white Democrats killed dozens of Black Republicans in what came to be known as the Colfax Massacre.39 Similarly, in 1875, a paramilitary group known as the Red Shirts organized in Mississippi to undermine Black political power by disrupting Republican rallies, intimidating Black voters with threats of violence and economic reprisal, and assassinating Black leaders.40

COLFAX, LOUISIANA

On Easter Sunday, 300 whites attacked the courthouse and three whites were killed in the assault. The outnumbered Black forces waved white flags in surrender, but the assault continued; numerous unarmed Black men who hid in the courthouse or attempted to flee were shot and killed. Approximately fifty African Americans who survived the afternoon assault were taken prisoner and executed by the white militia later that evening. As many as 150 African Americans were killed in the massacre, described as "the bloodiest single act of carnage in all of Reconstruction."43

The whites who exacted this violence faced no consequences because the United States Supreme Court dismissed all federal charges against them.

The local narrative in Colfax has continued to praise the cause of racial violence and embrace the message of racial hatred. In 1921, the town erected a memorial to the three whites who died during the Colfax Massacre, memorializing them as "heroes [who] fell . . . fighting for white supremacy." In 1950, at the site of the old courthouse, the state erected a monument that reads, "On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of misrule in the South." Today, Colfax is a town of less than 2000 people. Both markers still stand.

The earliest seeds of violent white resistance to Reconstruction were planted in Pulaski, Tennessee, in late 1865, when six Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan.Famed Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was the Klan's first leader, or Grand Wizard, and today he is immortalized in stone monuments in many towns and cities throughout the South.44 Made up of well-educated young men of comparative wealth who would go on to prominent careers in law and state politics, the group was initially informal, with a stated purpose of "amusement."45 The KKK spread quickly and developed a complex hierarchy with rules as intricate as an army manual. In less than a year, chapters spread throughout Tennessee and into northern Alabama. 46 Far from the small band of extremist outsiders it is now, the Klan drew members from every echelon of white society in the nineteenth century, including planters, lawyers, merchants, and ministers. In York County, South Carolina, nearly the entire white male population joined.47 The Klan and similar organizations, including the Knights of the White Camelia and the Pale Faces, were independent and de-centralized but shared aims and tactics to form a vast network of terrorist cells. By the 1868 presidential election, those cells were poised to act as a unified military force supporting the cause of white supremacy throughout the South.48

Shortly before the 1868 election, progressive Republicans looking to remove President Andrew Johnson managed to have him impeached by the House of Representatives but failed to secure his conviction in the Senate. As a result, Johnson remained in office and the Republican party suffered politically. As a result, former Union General Ulysses S. Grant-a moderate-won the Republican presidential nomination.In the general election, Grant faced former New York Governor Horatio Seymour, who campaigned as the "white man's candidate." In a March 11, 1868 speech to the New York State Democratic Convention, Seymour said that Black people "are in form, color, and character unlike the whites, and [] are, in their present condition, an ignorant and degraded race."As white terror groups sought to suppress the Black vote and deliver the South for Seymour, violent attacks in Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia resulted in hundreds of deaths and successfully prevented Black people from casting a single vote in many counties with significant Black populations.49 50 Seymour also criticized post-war congressional civil rights laws that, by prohibiting racial discrimination and establishing equal citizenship rights, "abolished the Black man and made him a white man by legislation."51 52

Varied white groups took up the cause of restoring labor discipline in the absence of slavery. Vigilantes whipped and lynched Black freedmen who argued with employers, left the plantations where they were contracted to work, or displayed any economic success of their own.54 White terror groups also focused intense energy on imposing "their own vision of a righteous society,"55 which usually meant targeting Black men for perceived sexual transgressions against white women. Charges of rape, while common, were "routinely fabricated" and often extrapolated from minor violations of the social code, such as "paying a compliment" to a white woman, expressing romantic interest in a white woman, or cohabitating interracially.56 White mobs regularly attacked Black men accused of sexual crimes and historians estimate that at least 400 African Americans were lynched between 1868 and 1871.57 Whites also sought retribution for alleged rapes by targeting entire Black communities with violent, public, and sexualized attacks, including forcing victims to strip, binding them in compromising positions, and whipping their genitals; widespread rape of Black women, sometimes in front of their families; and genital mutilation and castration.58 Through these acts of violence, white vigilantes used terror "to revive the privileges of white masculinity over the bodies of their former slaves."59

WAVERING SUPPORT: FEDERAL INDIFFERENCE AND LEGAL OPPOSITION

Campbell's case and several others were consolidated into The Slaughterhouse Cases and considered by a newly activist Supreme Court. Prior to 1865, the Court had only twice struck down congressional acts as unconstitutional; between 1865 and 1872, the Court did so twelve times.68 The Slaughterhouse Cases would make thirteen.

The Court's 1872 decision held that the Fourteenth Amendment protected solely the conferred by national citizenship-a narrow category of rights mostly irrelevant to the struggles facing Southern Black people.69 The Court reasoned that rights derived from a person's state citizenship were enforceable only in state court-a forum dominated by the white ruling class and utterly hostile to claims by African Americans in the South. Though The Slaughterhouse Cases explicitly acknowledged that the Reconstruction amendments were adopted to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people, the decision eviscerated their practical impact by drastically limiting freedmen's ability to enforce their rights in federal court, the only forum where they stood a chance of a fair hearing.

The response was immediate. Enforcement Act trials in most of the Southern states had been halted pending the Supreme Court appeal. When Cruikshank was decided, the Justice Department dropped 179 Enforcement Act prosecutions in Mississippi alone.75 Violence continued to spread, and increasingly, attacks on African Americans in the South were carried out by undisguised men in broad daylight.76

The Amnesty Act was passed over the objection of Congressman Jefferson Long. Born into slavery in 1836 and elected in 1870 as Georgia's first Black representative in the United States Congress, Long became the first Black person to speak on the House floor when he opposed amnesty.

Long asked: "Do we, then, really propose here today, when the country is not ready for it, when those disloyal people still hate this government, when loyal men dare not carry the 'stars and stripes' through our streets, for if they do they will be turned out of employment, to relieve from political disability the very men who have committed these Kuklux outrages? I think that I am doing my duty to my constituents and my duty to my country when I vote against any such proposition...

Mr. Speaker, I propose, as a man raised as a slave, my mother a slave before me, and my ancestry slaves as far back as I can trace them... If this House removes the disabilities of disloyal men by modifying the test-oath, I venture to prophesy you will again have trouble from the very same men who gave you trouble before."78

Long's warning went unheeded. Even before Reconstruction's official end, Confederate veterans espousing white supremacist rhetoric were able to employ violent intimidation to regain political control over many Southern governments. In Virginia, former Confederate General James L. Kemper was inaugurated as governor in 1874 and, that same year, delivered an address to the General Assembly outlining the racial regime he intended to create:

Things were not much better outside the South, as the Supreme Court continued to chip away at federal Reconstruction laws. In 1875, Congress passed Senator Charles Sumner's Civil Rights Act, which mandated desegregation and imposed criminal penalties for racial discrimination in jury selection.83 But the Cruikshank decision left little legal basis to enforce desegregation provisions, and in 1883, the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional.84 The next decade, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court would uphold racial segregation as fully consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment and create the doctrine of "separate but equal."85

On the defeat of Reconstruction, The Nation offered a solemn assessment: "The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.""They are to be returned to a condition of serfdom," predicted Governor Ames of Mississippi. "An era of second slavery."88 For millions of Black men, women, and children, that abandonment foretold a grim future. 89

AFTER RECONSTRUCTION: UNEQUAL, AGAIN

The presence of federal troops in the South during the Reconstruction era acted as a penetrable dam holding back some of the violence, political suppression, and racist rhetoric employed by those intent on restoring white supremacist rule. Their premature withdrawal unleashed a pent-up wave of violence that easily topped the few remaining protective structures and left Black people cemented in an inferior economic, social, and political position.

Over the ensuing decades, aided by convict leasing and Jim Crow laws, and emboldened by the federal government's disinterest in enforcing the racial equality guaranteed by the federal Constitution, Southern legislatures institutionalized the racial inequality enshrined in their state constitutions. The South created a system of state and local laws and practices that constituted a pervasive and deep-rooted racial caste system. The era of "second slavery" had officially begun.

CONVICT LEASING

JIM CROW

In South Carolina, a 1917 law required that all circuses and other tent events maintain separate entrances and ticket booths for Black and white attendees and imposed a maximum $500 fine for noncompliance.104 A 1915 law required that Black and white employees of cotton textile mills be segregated at every stage of employment and restricted them from using the same entry/exit, occupying the same stairwell, or using the same tools.105 A 1924 law effectively outlawed interracial pool rooms by declaring that no license would be issued to a billiard room owner who intended his establishment to be patronized by customers of another race.106 And a 1910 law prohibited placing a white child in the permanent custody of a Black adult.107 Similarly, Florida law required separation of the races on streetcars;108 Mississippi law mandated separate hospital entrances for white and Black patients;109 North Carolina law authorized librarians to create separate reading areas for Black patrons;110 and Alabama law prohibited white nurses from treating Black male patients.111

Racial segregation often translated to the total exclusion of Black people from public facilities, institutions, and opportunities. This separation plainly disadvantaged Black people and served as a constant symbol of their inferior position in Southern society.

Though legally emancipated from slavery and endowed with constitutional rights to participate in society as full citizens, Black people soon learned that those rights were unenforceable in a white-controlled political system hostile to their exercise. This message was communicated through an intricate and complex system of racial subordination built after the Civil War to maintain and reinforce white supremacy in a world without chattel slavery. Constructed of law and custom, force and fear, disenfrachisement, convict leasing, and Jim Crow segregation, the system was fragile and fiercely guarded. Over the century that this racial caste system reigned, perceived violations of the racial order were met with brutal violence targeted at Black Americans-and lynching was the weapon of choice.

Even as lynchings became more frequently deadly, they differed greatly by region. An individual subject to a frontier lynching typically was accused of a crime such as murder or robbery, given some form of process and trial, and hanged without any additional torture or foul play.120 Southern lynchings, on the other hand, were commonly extrajudicial and employed to defend slavery.121 Between 1830 and 1860, Southern mobs killed an estimated 130 white individuals122 and at least 400 enslaved Black people. Most were lynched under suspicion of conspiring to mount a slave uprising-a growing but largely unsubstantiated fear among whites in slaveholding states.123 In addition, Southern lynchings of African Americans were distinct from lynchings of whites, and often featured extreme brutality such as burning, torture, mutilation, and decapitation of the victim.124

The character of the violence also changed as gruesome public spectacle lynchings became much more common. At these often festive community gatherings, large crowds of whites watched and participated in the Black victims' prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and burning at the stake."Lynching has been resorted to by whites not merely to wreak vengeance, but to terrorize and restrain this lawless element in the Negro population. Among Southern people, the conviction is general that terror is the only restraining influence that can be brought to bear upon vicious Negroes."130 Such brutally violent methods of execution had almost never been applied to whites in America. Indeed, public spectacle lynchings drew from and perpetuated the belief that Africans were subhuman-a myth that had been used to justify centuries of enslavement, and now fueled and purportedly justified terrorism aimed at newly-emancipated African American communities.131 A report published in 1905 explained that 132

Through lynching, Southern white communities asserted their racial dominance over the region's political and economic resources-a dominance first achieved through slavery would now be restored through blood and terror.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LYNCHING ERA

The thousands of African Americans lynched between 1880 and 1950 differed in many respects, but in most cases, the circumstances of their murders can be categorized as one or more of the following: (1) lynchings that resulted from a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; (2) lynchings in response to casual social transgressions; (3) lynchings based on allegations of serious violent crime; (4) public spectacle lynchings; (5) lynchings that escalated into large-scale violence targeting the entire African American community; and (6) lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and community leaders who resisted mistreatment, which were most common between 1915 and 1940.

LYNCHINGS BASED ON FEAR OF INTERRACIAL SEX

Whites' fears of interracial sex extended to any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman. In 1889, in Aberdeen, Mississippi, Keith Bowen allegedly tried to enter a room where three white women were sitting; though no further allegation was made against him, Mr. Bowen was lynched by the "entire (white) neighborhood" for his "offense."144

William Brooks was lynched in 1894 in Palestine, Arkansas, after he asked his white employer for permission to marry the man's daughter.145

General Lee, a Black man, was lynched by a white mob in 1904 for merely knocking on the door of a white woman's house in Reevesville, South Carolina.146

In 1912, Thomas Miles was lynched for allegedly writing letters to a white woman inviting her to have a cold drink with him.147

In 1934, after being accused of "associating with a white woman" in Newton, Texas, John Griggs was hanged and shot seventeen times and his body was dragged behind a car through the town for hours.148

Whites' fear of sexual contact between Black men and white women was pervasive and led to many lynchings. Narratives of these lynchings reported in the sympathetic white press justified the violence and perpetuated the deadly stereotype of African American men as hypersexual threats to white womanhood.

LYNCHINGS BASED ON MINOR SOCIAL TRANSGRESSIONS

In 1940, Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, for referring to a white police officer by his name without the title of "mister."150

In 1918, Private Charles Lewis was lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, after he refused to empty his pockets while wearing his Army uniform.151

Richard Wilkerson was lynched in Manchester, Tennessee, in 1934 for allegedly slapping a white man who had assaulted a Black woman at an African American dance.152

White men lynched Jeff Brown in 1916 in Cedarbluff, Mississippi, for accidentally bumping into a white girl as he ran to catch a train.153

In 1917, Sam Gates was lynched for the offense of "annoying white girls" in England, Arkansas.154

Law-abiding African Americans lived at risk of arbitrary and deadly mob violence. These lynchings and the threat of falling victim to the mobs who committed them sought to keep the African American community terrorized and in a constant state of fear.

LYNCHINGS BASED ON ALLEGATIONS OF CRIME

More than half of the lynching victims EJI documented were killed under accusation of committing murder or rape. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. This was especially true in cases of violent crime against white victims.

It is dubious to claim that all or even most individuals lynched for violent offenses had committed them, considering that whites' accusations of rape or murder were rarely subject to serious scrutiny when lodged against Black people. In a strictly maintained racial caste system, the mere suggestion of Black-on-white violence could spark outrage, mob violence, and murder before the judicial system could act. In this society, white lives held heightened value, while the lives of Black people held little or none.

Race, rather than the alleged offense, sealed lynching victims' fates. Lynching, a statement of racial terror and white supremacy, was largely reserved for Black suspects. White people accused of murder or rape during this era were much more likely to be tried, convicted, and punished by the legal system than by a mob.157 In Thomasville, Georgia, in 1930, a Black man named William Kirkland was arrested for the alleged rape of a nine-year-old white girl, and before a trial could be held, a mob of between fifty and seventy-five white men seized him from the jail, hung his body from a tree, riddled it with bullets, and then dragged the corpse through town behind a truck before depositing it on the courthouse lawn.158 Just three days after Mr. Kirkland's lynching, an African American man named Lacy Mitchell was lynched in Thomasville for testifying against a white man accused of raping an African American woman. Mr. Mitchell, a key witness, was shot in his home by four white men and died; the white defendant was acquitted and released.159

PUBLIC SPECTACLE LYNCHINGS

These killings were not the actions of a few marginalized vigilantes or extremists; they were bold, public acts that implicated the entire community and sent a clear message that African Americans were less than human, their subjugation was to be achieved through any means necessary, and whites who undertook the duty of carrying out lynchings would face no legal repercussions.

PARIS, TEXAS

Founded in 1844, Paris, Texas, was named for the famous French city and quickly became the seat of Lamar County.169 By the start of the Civil War, the town of 700 residents was a center of farming and cattle ranching,170 and 28 percent of county residents were enslaved Black people.171 In the lynching era that followed the Civil War and emancipation, Paris was the site of repeated bloody racial terror.

Today, Paris is a small but vibrant and diverse city of 25,000 people, with no historical markers to document either lynching. A large Confederate memorial adorns the courthouse lawn-a site of racial unrest in the twenty-first century.

In 2008, a twenty-four-year-old Black man named Brandon McClelland was found dead by a roadside in Paris. An investigation determined he had been dragged behind or under a vehicle as far as seventy feet. Two white men who spent several hours with Mr. McClelland on the night he died were arrested after blood reportedly was found on the undercarriage of their truck. When the local prosecutor dropped all charges against the men in 2009, citing a lack of evidence, racial tensions flared. Members of the local Black community rallying at the courthouse to protest officials' inaction were met with a counter-protest by dozens of white supremacists holding Confederate flags and shouting "White Power!" State police in riot gear were called to quell the conflict.175

LYNCHINGS TARGETING THE ENTIRE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY

The practice of terrorizing an entire African American community after lynching one alleged "wrong-doer" demonstrates that Southern lynching during this era was not to attain "popular justice" or retaliation for crime. Rather, these lynchings were designed for broad impact-to send a message of domination, to instill fear, and sometimes to drive African Americans from the community altogether.

LYNCHINGS OF Black PEOPLE RESISTING MISTREATMENT (1915 - 1940)

From 1915 to 1940, lynch mobs targeted African Americans who protested being treated as second-class citizens. African Americans throughout the South, individually and in organized groups, were demanding the economic and civil rights to which they were entitled. In response, whites turned to lynching.

African Americans' efforts to fight for economic power and equal rights in the early twentieth century-a prelude to the civil rights movement-were violently repressed by whites who acted with impunity. Whites used terrorism to relegate African Americans to a state of second-class citizenship and economic disadvantage that would last for generations after emancipation and create far-reaching consequences.

LYNCHINGS IN THE SOUTH, 1877 - 1950

This report documents 4084 lynchings of Black people that occurred in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950. The data reveals telling trends across time and region, including that lynchings peaked between 1880 and 1940. (See Figure 1.)

Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana had the highest absolute number of African American lynching victims during this period. (See Table 1.) The rankings change when the number of lynchings are considered relative to each state's total population and African American population. Mississippi, Florida, and Arkansas had the highest per capita rates of lynching by total population, while Arkansas, Florida, and Mississippi had the highest per capita rates of lynching by African American population. (See Tables 2 and 3.)

The twenty-five counties with the highest rates of lynchings of African Americans during this era are located in eight of the twelve states studied: Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, and Mississippi. The terror of lynching was not confined to a few outlier states. Racial terror cast a shadow of fear across the region. (See Tables 4 and 5.)

(Rank, County, Lynchings)

Lynching Outside the South, 1877-1950

In addition to the 4084 documented lynchings committed in the South between 1877 and 1950, EJI has documented more than 300 racial terror lynchings of Black people that took place in other parts of the United States during the same period. The vast majority of these 341 lynchings were concentrated in eight states: Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Though the numbers were lower, mirroring the lower concentration of Black residents in these states, racial terror lynchings committed outside the South featured many of the same characteristics.

EJI found the highest numbers of documented racial terror lynchings outside the South during the lynching era in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois, and those totals were largely fueled by acts of mass violence against entire Black communities that left many people dead, property destroyed, and survivors traumatized.

The lynching era was fueled by the movement to restore white supremacy and domination, but Northern and federal officials who failed to act as Black people were terrorized and murdered enabled this campaign of racial terrorism. For more than six decades, as Southern whites used lynching to enforce a post-slavery system of racial dominance, white officials outside the South watched and did little.

TURNING A BLIND EYE TO LYNCHING: NORTHERN AND FEDERAL COMPLICITY

Congress made efforts to pass federal anti-lynching bills throughout the lynching era, but Southern white representatives predictably and consistently protested so-called federal interference in local affairs.Very few white people were convicted of murder for lynching a Black person in America during this period,197 Southern states passed their own anti-lynching laws to demonstrate that federal legislation was unnecessary,198 but refused to enforce them. 199 and of all lynchings committed after 1900, only 1 percent resulted in a lyncher being convicted of a criminal offense.200

Throughout the lynching era, as thousands of Black people were killed and countless more were terrorized by racial violence, Congress repeatedly failed to muster enough votes to pass any of the anti-lynching statutes proposed, largely due to arguments that no such law could withstand a constitutional test under the Court's Reconstruction-era precedent.Southern officials seized on this rhetoric and argued that, because lynching primarily affected Black people, federal lynching legislation constituted racial "favoritism" and reprised what most regarded as failed Reconstruction-era policies.202 Further, the majority opinion in Cruikshank had declared-barely a decade after emancipation-that formerly-enslaved people had reached the "stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws," and thus had no claim to specialized legal protection.203 204

By 1886, a "New South" controlled by white supremacist leaders was largely established. The dominant political narrative blamed lynching on its victims, insisting that brutal mob violence was the only appropriate response to the growing scourge of Black men raping white women.208 Northern academics promoting the field of concocted theories to legitimate the claim that Black men were dangerous subhumans predisposed to rape. By the late 1880s, numerous American scholars viewed African Americans as "a race that was devolving on the scale of civilization and becoming increasingly dangerous."209 University of Pennsylvania professor Daniel G. Brinton, who later became president of the International Congress of Anthropology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, opined in 1890 that Black people had regressed to "midway between the Orang-utang and the European white."210 Brown University sociologist Lester Ward likewise concluded in 1930 that the Black man was compelled by the "imperious voice of nature to rape white women and thus raise his race to a little higher level."211 It would be another two decades before liberal anthropologists and other social scientists debunked these malicious myths, marking a turning point in the public discourse about race.212

Meanwhile, Southern white politicians relied on "lynching and vigilantism as instruments of political terrorism"The Republican Party responded to its electoral defeat by abandoning racial equality as a platform; it "defected entirely to the resurgent white supremacist order," and in 1896 regained power by running "strictly as a party of economic interests, not civil rights."213 to recreate state governments based in white supremacy and worked hard to defeat proposed federal laws that would have protected Black citizens' voting rights. Southern officials branded proposed voter protection legislation a "Force Bill" that would trample states' rights and create a dangerous "new Reconstruction" in which increased Black voting would arouse Black criminality.214 Its success in defeating efforts to protect and restore Black Americans' voting rights allowed the Southern-dominated Democratic Party to win the White House and a majority of Congress in 1892-just as the national lynching rate soared. 215

By the start of the twentieth century, national leaders had learned to profitably employ popular white supremacist views and pro-lynching rhetoric. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that "the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by Black men, of the hideous crime of rape.""[If] it requires lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from ravening, drunken human beasts," white women's rights activist Rebecca Felton wrote in the Atlanta Journal in 1898, "then I say lynch a thousand a week if necessary."216 "Let [the Black man] keep his hands off white women," the Memphis Avalanche-Appeal editorialized, "and lynching will soon die out."217 218

OPPOSITION TO LYNCHING

Black anti-lynching activists like journalists Ida B. Wells222 and T. Thomas Fortune and Tuskegee sociologist Monroe Work harnessed the growing power of the Black press.223 Their articles demanded that lynch mobs be held accountable for committing murder and launched a public education campaign to combat the spread of misinformation and dispute the myth of widespread Black-on-white rape.224 Black advocates also formed national anti-lynching organizations and petitioned for legislation and official intervention in response to lynchings.225

In February 1898, a white mob in Lake City, South Carolina, set fire to the home of the Baker family and riddled it with gunshots, killing Frazier Baker and his infant daughter, Julia, and leaving his wife and five surviving children wounded and traumatized. Baker, a Black man, had aroused the hatred of the predominately white community when President William McKinley appointed him to the position of local postmaster. After efforts to have Baker removed from the post failed, local whites resorted to mob violence.226 The murder prompted a national campaign of letter-writing, activism, and advocacy spearheaded by Wells and others, which ultimately persuaded President McKinley to order a federal investigation that resulted in the prosecution of eleven white men implicated in the Baker lynching. Despite ample evidence, an all-white jury refused to convict any of the defendants.

Ida B. Wells

Anti-lynching crusader Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862.227 At age eighteen, she moved to Memphis to work as a teacher and at age twenty-two, she sued the Chesapeake & Ohio & Southeastern Railroad Company for forcibly removing her from a train after she refused to be reseated in a segregated car. Though she ultimately lost the case, the effort foreshadowed her lifelong fight against racial injustice.228

An avid reader and writer, Ms. Wells became a popular columnist in Black newspapers while in Memphis, eventually rising to editor and part owner of the local Free Speech and Headlight.229 She regularly used the platform to criticize racial inequality. When Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart-three Black men and friends of Ms. Wells-were brutally lynched in Memphis in March 1892 for defending their grocery business against white attackers, she immediately published an editorial urging Memphis's Black community to "save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons."230

More than 6000 African Americans heeded the call, but Ms. Wells stayed to promote the movement she had begun. In May 1892, she published another editorial that challenged the claim that lynching was necessary to protect white womanhood. In response, Memphis's white newspapers denounced and derided Ms. Wells as a "black scoundrel." On May 27, 1892, while she was visiting Philadelphia, a white mob attacked and destroyed the Free Speech and Headlight office and threatened her with bodily harm if she returned.231

Ms. Wells relocated to New York, where she continued her anti-lynching efforts by writing for the New York Age, publishing several anti-lynching pamphlets, and embarking on a speaking tour through the Northern states and Britain, where she decried the atrocities of lynching and urged federal and international intervention.232 Ultimately settling in Chicago, Ms. Wells became Mrs. Wells-Barnett and raised five children while collaborating with leaders like Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois; helping to found the NAACP; organizing legal aid for victims of the 1918 race riots; publicly challenging racism within the women's rights movement; and remaining the nation's foremost anti-lynching crusader for forty years.233

In the preface to her 1892 pamphlet, Southern Horrors, Ida B. Wells-Barnett described the goal of her life's work: "The Afro American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance."234 She died of natural causes in Chicago in 1931, as the terror of the lynching era still raged and before the legacy of her tireless dedication was fully realized.

Black efforts to combat racial violence during the lynching era spawned many important Black organizations, including the nation's most effective and longstanding, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP formed in direct response to racial attacks in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908-an outbreak of violence that shocked Northerners and demonstrated that lynching was not only a Southern phenomenon.235 When it officially launched in 1910, the NAACP's president, treasurer, board chair, and secretary were all white men; the organization was one of the first in America in which white and Black, male and female members worked side by side on a public level.236 When the NAACP made lynching a primary focus in 1912,237 its support in the Black community soared. By 1919, 310 chapters boasted 91,203 members nationwide.238 Black scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois served as editor of the NAACP news magazine The Crisis. By 1919, the magazine had a circulation of 100,000 and soon became the most influential race publication in the country's history.239

Due in large part to the racist propaganda disseminated during World War ISouthern lawmakers mobilized against the bill in the Senate, resurrecting familiar objections demanding In the end, Southern Democrats filibustered the Dyer bill in the Senate and, on December 4, 1922, it was officially abandoned.240 and the nationwide outbreak of racial violence that characterized the "Red Summer" of 1919,241 lynching became a major national issue by the 1920s. The NAACP launched a renewed campaign for federal anti-lynching legislation that succeeded in winning passage of the Dyer anti-lynching bill in the House of Representatives on January 26, 1922, by a vote of 231-119.242 243 alleging racial favoritism, and warning of the threat of Black rapists. Southern representatives appealed to racial division by accusing the law's supporters of promoting an unconstitutional bill to satisfy "Negro agitators"244 and shield rapists from justice.245 Tennessee Representative Finis J. Garrett suggested the bill's title be amended to read, "A bill to encourage rape."246 247

The NAACP continued to push for federal anti-lynching legislation into the 1930s. Though white supremacist Southern Democrats continued to use the filibuster to defeat proposed bills,In 1919, a group of primarily white Southerners formed the anti-lynching Committee on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta, and in 1930, it launched the Association of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching (ASWPL). By 1940, the ASWPL claimed 40,000 supporters,248 the NAACP's campaign decrying lynching as "America's shame" helped turn the tide of public opinion-including in the South. 249 and by 1937, Gallup polls showed overwhelming white support for anti-lynching legislation.250

The NAACP's campaign persuaded some Southern newspapers to oppose lynching because it was damaging the South's image and economic prospects.By the mid-1930s, "forward-looking white Southerners were compelled to adopt the position that lynching was barbaric and disgraceful, even as they continued to defend white supremacy or rail against Black criminality."251 252 Also, in the 1940s, for the first time in four decades the Federal Bureau of Investigation increased investigations of lynchings,253 and the Department of Justice began using NAACP lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston's legal theory that the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 created federal jurisdiction over such crimes.254

Though the growth of Northern cities and wartime industrial work increased the volume of Black movement out of the South, the terror of lynching and other racial violence had long made the South a tenuous homeland for Black Americans. In a letter published in the Chicago Defender, one Black migrant explained, "After twenty years of seeing my people lynched for any offense from spitting on a sidewalk to stealing a mule, I made up my mind that I would turn the prow of my ship toward the part of the country where the people at least made a pretense at being civilized."261

Lynchings of Mexican Nationals

Lynching and racial violence in border states of the South and Southwest from 1849 to 1928 targeted Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, who were shot en masse and lynched by mobs that often included Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials.

While these lynchings frequently took place after an allegation of crime, Latino people, like African Americans, were considered undeserving of arrest and trial, and some were lynched not for crimes but for social transgressions such as "practicing witchcraft," suing a white person, or yelling "Viva Diaz."

Researchers estimate that hundreds of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans were lynched in the South and Southwest during this period, and have identified 232 lynchings in Texas alone.

Scholars have argued that these lynchings in border states served to establish white economic, political, and social dominance in the border areas acquired by the United States following the war with Mexico. Violence forced Mexican residents of territory newly claimed by the United States to flee their homes, allowing whites to seize their land and natural resources.264

When the era of racial terror and widespread lynching ended in the mid-twentieth century, it left behind a nation and an American South fundamentally altered by decades of systematic community-based violence against Black Americans. The effects of the lynching era echoed through the latter half of the twentieth century. African Americans continued to face violent intimidation when they transgressed social boundaries or asserted their civil rights, and the criminal justice system continued to target people of color and victimize African Americans. These legacies have yet to be confronted.

VIOLENT INTIMIDATION AND OPPOSITION TO EQUALITY

After the rate of lynchings abated, the central feature of the era of racial terror-violence against Black Americans-took new forms. The social forces and racial animus that made lynching a frequent occurrence and constant threat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained deeply rooted in American culture, and violent intimidation continued to be used to preserve social control and white supremacy. African Americans in the South faced violence, threats, and intimidation in myriad areas of daily life, with no protection from the justice system.

Black Southerners who survived the lynching era remained subject to the established legal system of racial apartheid known as Jim Crow. As organized resistance to this racial caste system began to swell in the early 1950s, Black demonstrators were met with violent opposition from white police officers and community members. Black activists protesting racial segregation and disenfranchisement through boycotts, sit-ins, voter registration drives, and mass marches consistently faced physical attacks, riots, and bombings from whites.

As a leader of the nonviolent protest movement, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged white law enforcement officials and private citizens who issued death threats, physically assaulted him at public lectures, and bombed his Montgomery, Alabama, home while his wife and infant daughter were inside. Police attacked demonstrators during highly publicized events like Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Even Black children engaging in peaceful demonstrations were at great risk of harm and death. In 1963, four young girls were killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed, and that year, more than 700 Black children protesting racial segregation in the city were arrested, blasted with fire hoses, clubbed by police, and attacked by police dogs.

SHERIDAN, ARKANSAS

On Tuesday, October 6, 1903, a mob of masked men took Ed McCollum, a Black citizen of Grant County, Arkansas, from the county jail in Sheridan. The men tied him to a tree on the lawn of the county courthouse in the town's center square and shot him to death, leaving his body "riddled with bullets."266 Mr. McCollum had been in the county jail since the previous Saturday for wounding a local constable during an arrest.267 Newspaper coverage of the lynching was terse and matter-of-fact, a reflection of how common such extrajudicial killings of African Americans had become during this time and in this region.

The town of Sheridan remained a hostile environment for African Americans in the following decades, but some found work at the local sawmill and built a small, resilient Black community.

In May 1954, four days after the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education banned racial segregation in public schools, Sheridan's school board unanimously voted to integrate its junior high and high schools.268 Under the vote, twenty-one Black students would join six hundred white students in upper school that fall and were guaranteed a discrimination-free experience in athletics, cafeteria service, and school dances.269 Younger Black students would continue to attend the local two-room segregated lower school.270 The district's swift move toward integration, which made Sheridan the first community in the South to take such action after Brown, was likely influenced by the fact that the town was spending nearly $5000 per year to maintain segregation by busing Black high school students to a segregated school twenty-five miles away.271

Recently, James Seawood, a Black man who attended Sheridan's segregated elementary school as a child, recalled marveling at the white school's huge building, marching band, and football team from atop the sawmill's lumber stacks before returning to his own two-room school with two teachers and outdoor toilets. Mr. Seawood's mother was the last Black teacher in Sheridan. Just before they left town, they watched a bulldozer dig a large hole and push the entire school into the ground, then cover it up, wiping out all evidence of its existence.274

Much of Sheridan's racial history of lynching, segregation, and violent intimidation has also been buried. The town remained completely white for decades, and its public schools did not desegregate until 1992, when the school districts of two small interracial communities nearby consolidated with the larger district. Even then, Sheridan's white parents and students yelled racial epithets during high school sporting events against interracial teams. In 2014, less than 2 percent of the town's residents were African American.275

RACIALLY-BIASED CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND MASS CRIMINALIZATION

Southern courts were deeply embedded in the exploitation of Black workers in the South long after the formal abolition of slavery. States exploited the Thirteenth Amendment's exemption for prisoners by passing "Black Codes" and convict leasing laws that branded Black people as criminals to facilitate their reenslavement for state profit.277 Further, although the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and Supreme Court rulings banned racial discrimination in jury selection,278 local officials barred African Americans from serving on juries.279 African Americans "virtually disappeared from the Southern jury box by 1900, even in counties where they constituted an overwhelming majority of the local population,"280 which reinforced the impunity under which lynching flourished.281 The fairness of the judicial system was wholly compromised for African Americans, and the courts operated as tools of their subjugation.

Lynching also directly fostered the racialization of criminality. Whites defended vigilante violence aimed at Black people as a necessary tactic of self-preservation to protect property, families, and the Southern way of life from dangerous Black criminals. The link between lynching and the image of African Americans as "criminal" and "dangerous" was sometimes explicit, such as when lynchings occurred in response to allegations of criminal behavior. In other cases, white mobs justified lynching as a preemptive strike against the threat of Black violent crime.

Decades of racial terror in the American South reflected and reinforced a view that African Americans were dangerous criminals who posed a threat to innocent white citizens. Although the Constitution's presumption of innocence is a bedrock principle of American criminal justice, African Americans were assigned a presumption of guilt.

America has never addressed the effects of racial violence, the criminalization of African Americans, and the critical role these phenomena have played in shaping the American criminal justice system, particularly in the South. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, a signature legal achievement of the civil rights movement, contains provisions designed to eliminate discrimination in voting, education, and employment, but it does not address discrimination in criminal justice. Though the most insidious tool of racial subordination throughout the era of racial terror and its aftermath, the criminal justice system remains the institution in American life least impacted by the civil rights movement. Similarly, the system's endorsement of racist myths of Black criminality has never been meaningfully confronted. The unprecedented level of mass incarceration in America today is a contemporary manifestation of these past distortions and abuses that continues to limit the opportunities of our nation's most vulnerable.

LYNCHING'S LEGACY: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN AMERICA

"Perhaps the most important reason that lynching declined is that it was replaced by a more palatable form of violence."282

The most famous attempted "legal lynching" likely is that of the so-called Scottsboro Boys-nine young African Americans charged with raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. White mobs converged outside the courtroom during the trial to demand that the accused be executed. Represented by incompetent lawyers, the nine were convicted by all-white, all male juries within two days, and all but the youngest were sentenced to death. When the NAACP and others launched a national movement to challenge the cursory proceedings, "the white people of Scottsboro did not understand the reaction. After all, they did not lynch the accused; they gave them a trial."284 Many defendants of the era learned that being sentenced to death rather than lynched did little to increase the fairness of trial, reliability of conviction, or justness of sentence.

Northern states had abolished public executions by 1850, but some Southern states authorized the practice until 1938.285 Public hangings were often racialized displays intended to deter mob lynchings more than individual crimes.286 Following Will Mack's execution by public hanging in Brandon, Mississippi, in 1909, the Brandon News reasoned that "public hangings are wrong, but under the circumstances, the quiet acquiescence of the people to submit to a legal trial, and their good behavior throughout, left no alternative to the board of supervisors but to grant the almost universal demand for a public execution."287 Mobs often succeeded in forcing a public hanging in Southern states where the practice was illegal.

In Sumterville, Florida, in 1902, a Black man named Henry Wilson was convicted of murder in a trial that lasted just two hours and forty minutes. To mollify the mob of armed whites that filled the courtroom, the judge promised the death sentence would be carried out by public hanging, despite state law prohibiting public executions. Even so, when the execution was set for a later date, the enraged mob threatened, "We'll hang him before sundown, governor or no governor."288 Florida officials quickly moved up the date, authorized Mr. Wilson to be hanged before a jeering mob, and congratulated themselves on the "avoided" lynching.

By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time.289 Two-thirds of those executed in the 1930s were Black,290 and the trend continued. As African Americans fell to just 22 percent of the South's population between 1910 and 1950, they constituted 75 percent of those executed in the South during that period.291

In the 1940s and 1950s, the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund (LDF) began a multi-decade litigation strategy to challenge the American death penalty-which was most active in the South-as racially-biased and unconstitutional.292 They won in Furman v. Georgia in 1972 when the United States Supreme Court struck down Georgia's death penalty statute, holding that capital punishment too closely resembled "self-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law" and that "if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race."293

Southern opponents decried the decision and immediately proposed new death penalty statutes.294 In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's new death penalty statute and reinstated the American death penalty, capitulating to the claim that legal executions were needed to prevent vigilante violence.295

The new death penalty statutes continued to result in racial imbalance, and constitutional challenges persisted. In the 1987 case of McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court considered statistical evidence demonstrating that Georgia decisionmakers were more than four times as likely to impose death for the killing of a white person than a Black person. Accepting the data as accurate, The Court described racial bias in sentencing as "an inevitable part of our criminal justice system"296 and upheld Warren McCleskey's death sentence because he had failed to identify a "constitutionally significant risk of racial bias" in his case.297

Race remains a significant factor in capital sentencing. African Americans make up less than 13 percent of the nation's population, but nearly 42 percent of those currently on death row in America are Black,298 and 34 percent of those executed since 1976 have been Black.299 In 96 percent of states where researchers have completed studies examining the relationship between race and the death penalty, results reveal a pattern of discrimination based on the race of the victim, the race of the defendant, or both.300 Capital trials today remain proceedings with little racial diversity; the accused is often the only person of color in the courtroom and illegal racial discrimination in jury selection is widespread, especially in the South and in capital cases. In Houston County, Alabama, prosecutors have excluded 80 percent of qualified African Americans from juries in death penalty cases.301

More than eight in ten American lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, and more than eight in ten of the nearly 1400 legal executions carried out in this country since 1976 have been in the South.As contemporary proponents of the American death penalty focus on form rather than substance by tinkering with the aesthetics of lethal punishment to improve procedures and methods, capital punishment remains rooted in racial terror-"a direct descendant of lynching."302 Modern death sentences are disproportionately meted out to African Americans accused of crimes against white victims; efforts to combat racial bias and create federal protection against racial bias in the administration of the death penalty remain thwarted by familiar appeals to the rhetoric of states' rights; and regional data demonstrates that the modern death penalty in America mirrors racial violence of the past.303 304

The lynching era left thousands dead; it significantly marginalized Black people in the country's political, economic, and social systems; and it fueled a massive migration of Black refugees out of the South. In addition, lynching-and other forms of racial terrorism-inflicted deep traumatic and psychological wounds on survivors, witnesses, family members, and the entire African American community. Whites who participated in or witnessed gruesome lynchings and socialized their children in this culture of violence also were psychologically damaged. And state officials' indifference to and complicity in lynchings created enduring national and institutional wounds that we have not yet confronted or begun to heal. Establishing monuments and memorials to commemorate lynching has the power to end the silence and inaction that have compounded this psychosocial trauma and to begin the process of recovery.

THE NEED FOR MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS

Until the opening of EJI's National Memorial for Peace and Justice in 2018, no prominent monument or memorial commemorated the thousands of African Americans who were lynched during the American era of racial terrorism. Of the 4084 Southern lynchings documented in this report, the overwhelming majority took place on sites that remain unmarked and unrecognized. In contrast, the landscape of the South is cluttered with plaques, statues, and monuments that record, celebrate, and lionize generations of American defenders of white supremacy, including countless leaders of the Confederate war effort and white public officials and private citizens who perpetrated violent crimes against Black citizens during the era of racial terror. Many of these monuments, markers, and memorials have been erected in just the last sixty years. In this context, the lack of public memorials acknowledging racial terrorism is a powerful statement about our failure to value the African Americans who were killed or gravely wounded in this brutal campaign of racial violence.

Formal spaces that memorialize mass violence help to establish trust between communities and build faith in government institutions. Lynchings occurred in communities where African Americans today remain marginalized, disproportionately poor, overrepresented in prisons and jails, and underrepresented in decisionmaking roles in the criminal justice system-the institution most directly implicated in facilitating lynching and failing to protect Black Americans from racial violence. Only by telling the truth about the age of racial terror and collectively reflecting on this period and its legacy can we hope that our present-day conversations about racial exclusion and inequality - and any policies designed to address these issues - will be accurate, thoughtful, and informed.

SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY

Each lynching or near-lynching instilled an overwhelming sense of fear and terror in African Americans. Lynching underscored the "cheapness of Black life [and] reflected in turn the degree to which so many whites by the early twentieth century had come to think of Black men and women as inherently and permanently inferior, as less than human, as little more than animals." The traumatic experience of surviving mass violence creates "insecurity, mistrust, and disconnection from people"-a series of psychological harms that were amplified by the dangers inherent in navigating Southern racial boundaries. In the aftermath of a lynching, African Americans became "exceedingly circumspect in their dealings with whites;" survivors bore the burden of being indebted to "their 'white friends' for saving their lives."

Millions of Black Americans left the South between 1910 and 1970 in response to the instability and threat of violence that racial terror created in the region. These largely involuntary relocations compounded the trauma suffered by terror survivors, even as leaving the South improved their physical safety. After generations in this country, Black Americans who moved to the North and West were exiles-internally displaced people who "had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world" than with their new neighbors. African American migrants were less terrorized in their new cities and towns, but they were not entirely welcomed. Institutional inequality, continued marginalization, and unaddressed histories of trauma have created a unique legacy of chronic generational poverty, persistent urban distress, debilitating violence, and limited educational opportunities.

TRAUMATIC LEGACY FOR THE WHITE COMMUNITY

As attendees and participants in lynchings, Southern white children were taught to accept and embrace traumatic violence and the racist narratives underlying it. At one Kentucky lynching, young white children between six and ten years old brought wood and tended to the fire in which the victim was burned. Boys especially were expected to actively engage in lynching; their roles expanded as they got older until, as young adults, they took on a direct role in the torture and murder. Lynching was characterized as a civic duty of white Southern men that brought praise rather than sanctions from community elders and institutions.

Generations of white people were raised in communities where myths of racial superiority dominated and went largely unchallenged. Many of those people hold powerful positions today. There has been no significant effort to confront white Southerners with the damage done by lynching or to facilitate recovery, and we live with the lingering legacies of that inaction.

MARIANNA, FLORIDA

A visitor would never know that Marianna also is the site of one of the nation's most well-known public spectacle lynchings.

Marianna's legacy of violence and abusive racial mistreatment includes the Dozier School for Boys, a state juvenile reform school that operated in Marianna from 1900 until 2011. The school faced serious allegations of abuse and closed during a federal investigation. In 2014, researchers conducting an excavation project uncovered the remains of fifty-five boys in the school cemetery, which was twenty-four more than were documented in official records. Surviving former residents shared the experiences they endured at the Dozier School, which remained racially segregated until 1967. Richard Huntly, a sixty-seven-year-old Black man sent to the school at age eleven, recalled that white boys were given vocational work while he and other Black boys were made to work in the field planting and picking crops for state profit. "It was kind of like slavery," he told reporters in 2014.

In 2014, Marianna celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Marianna by honoring the memories of Confederate soldiers and officers who fought and died to preserve slavery and the white supremacist ideologies on which slavery was built. The community voice remains silent as to Marianna's other legacies. No prominent memorial or marker tells of Claude Neal's brutal lynching, and that silence is deafening.

IMPORTANCE FOR THE NATION

The United States government compounded the psychological harm experienced by African Americans by permitting the torture and murder of Black citizens. Federal and state officials' inaction communicated that no democratic institution valued Black citizens' lives enough to protect them against terrorism by local officials and private citizens alike. "They had to have a license to kill anything but a nigger," explained one African American man from the Mississippi Delta. "We was always in season." Today, public and private institutions in the South memorialize the Confederacy and celebrate the architects of white supremacy while remaining conspicuously silent about the terror, violence, and loss of life inflicted on Black Americans during the same historical period. This selective public memory compounds the harm of officials' complicity in lynching and maintains the otherness of Black people who have lived in these communities for generations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To heal the wounds from our present, we must face our past.

# data[].attributes.headline
Black Progress: How far we’ve come, and how far we have to go-Carmine

# data[].attributes.subject
Black Progress: How far we’ve come, and how far we have to go-Carmine

# data[].attributes.body
According to my article black people still get treated like crap. In 1940, 60% of employed black women worked as domestic servants; today the number is down to 2.2%, while 60 percent hold white- collar jobs. In 1958, 44% of whites said they would move if a black family became their next door neighbor; today the figure is 1%. In 1964, the year the great Civil Rights Act was passed, only 18 percent of whites claimed to have a friend who was black; today 86% say they do, while 87% of blacks assert they have white friends.
This proves they get treated like crap

Link:https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-progress-how-far-weve-come-and-how-far-we-have-to-go/

# data[].attributes.body
The articles “Beyond Bostock: The Future of LGBTQ Civil Rights” (Sharita Gruberg,  August 26, 2020, 9:01 am), “THE RIGHTS OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER PEOPLE” (ACLU, N/A), “WHY SODOMY LAWS MATTER” (ACLU, N/A), and “Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules” (Adam Liptak, June 16, 2020) all speak about how the rights of LGBT+ people are being threatened. Many people believe that the only threat to queer people are minor inconveniences. Which just isn’t true, queer people face discrimination with housing, medical treatment, marriage, adoption/fostering, and their jobs. Trump, the 45th US president, along with his administration got rid of many acts that protected queer people. Allowing queers to be discriminated against due to sexuality or/and gender identity. Due to this many queer employees have been fired due to their gender identity or sexual orientation. If they aren’t fired from that people can be fired for reporting discrimination or harassment due to it. Education also took a hit, transgender student athletes lost protection to. Sodomy laws also still exist, they are laws that defines certain sexual acts as crimes. This causes queers to be arrested for talking about the same things heterosexuals & cisgenders do. Due to how congress interpreted other titles (VII and XI specifically) sex discrimination doesn’t extend to trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, or anyone of the 72 gender.

I was shocked to find all the protection the Trump administration got rid of for LGBT+ people. I believed that the no transgender soldiers was the only “law” they instated against queer people. The amount of discrimination present for queer people I found astounding, I thought it wasn’t as prevalent. I now feel that we haven’t made much progress in the way of LGBT+ rights. I also do feel that this information may just be surface level compared to what else there might be.

# data[].attributes.body
Lynching, is practice of publicly executing someone for a crime without due process. Though they were often carried out by angry mobs, police. Most often, Black Americans were lynched by white mobs. These events were in newspapers, and drew large crowds. Commonly associated with just hangings, lynchings would often include torture before the person was hanged. Often times victims were whipped, and lost appendages. Instead of being hung, they were burned at the stake. After the victim was declared dead, members of the mob would leave. they would. sell their body parts. Pictures of large crowds smiling and laughing were often published in newspapers and sold as postcards. An estimated 4,742 lynchings took place between the years of 1882 and 1968.

The fact that it was ok is absurd. it was never ok and now people are trying to bring it back. (kkk) the KKK is not ok and should be stopped.

# data[].attributes.body
In the articles https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-lynching-america found on the NAACP site it was made in 2021 at some point it doesn't give a exact date .Hundreds of Black people were lynched based on accusations of other crimes, including murder, arson, robbery, and vagrancy. Many victims of lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime. They were killed for violating social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect than what white people believed they were owed. I believe that lynching was horrible and that most cases just like in 1955, a 14 year old, Emmett Till was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman.  Emmett whistled at a white woman and was hung for it.

# data[].attributes.body
A 66 year old woman from Nebraska tried to sue all lgbtq+ people. Sylvia Driskell, describes herself as an ambassador of “God, And His, Son Jesus Christ". She stated that “I never thought that I would see a day in which our great nation or our own great state of Nebraska would become so compliant to the complicity of some people's lewd behavior. that homosexuality is a sin and that they the homosexuals know it is a sin to live a life of homosexuality. Why else would they have been hiding in the closet.” Now Sylvia Driskell is going to court asking the lawyers if they think being gay is sin and should be punished. I think she is a little weird because who would go out and make a fool of yourself just to put something out to the world. Also i think it is funny because after she did that in 2015, 5 years later she became a meme because of what she did.

# data[].attributes.body
Today I read “History of Lynching in America” by NAACP. From 1882 from 1968 4,743 lynching occured in the US. Historians think that number is underreported however, because there was no tracking system for lynchings. Blacks were lynched for reasons like talking to a white person with not enough respect. Another reason that is unbelievable is a young black boy was lynched by “flirting with a white woman”. Some whites were also lynched because they were against lynchings. NAACP fought against lynching for a long time, they weren’t completely succesful though, because the congressmen didn’t want to do anything about it.

I think that lynchings were a horrible thing that happened to people. I think that blacks were just trying to live a normal life and white people just could not accept that they were the same. White people who did see that were also killed because there were so many people who didn’t.

# data[].attributes.body
Today I read, The Evidence of Things Unsaid by Tulani Salahu-Din and published on July 6, 2017. In this article, it told us about Matthew Williams, a man wrongfully accused of killing someone and got lynched. People took souvenirs from the lynching and one of the souvenirs, a part of the rope, was displayed in a museum. What fully happened to Matthew Williams though? In 1931, Matthew was accused of killing one of his friends and then trying to commit suicide shortly after(which landed him in a hospital), even though many accounts told that he was shot by his friends's son. However, the townspeople were convinced and marched to the hospital and threw him out the window and dragged him to the courthouse to hang him. The following week, they proudly showed off their souvenirs from the lynching, including the piece of rope that is now in the National Museum of African American history. I found this history actually sickening. Even though many white citizens told that he was the innocent one, he was still hung. What I also found horrible was that one of the nurse's just let them in and let them throw him out of the window to his inevitable hanging. This article was really sickening.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
National Museum of African American History and Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Just as this essay on the lynching of Matthew Williams was being finalized for publication, someone deposited a rope noose in the Museum. The noose was discovered by visitors on May 30, 2017 in the exhibition, Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation.

We hope this essay will help those unfamiliar with the history of lynching and the potent symbolism of the noose better understand the impact of this symbolic act and the response of the Museum community.

As Director Lonnie Bunch has said,

"The noose has long represented a deplorable act of cowardice and depravity-a symbol of extreme violence for African Americans. Today's incident is a painful reminder of the challenges that African Americans continue to face. Our museum is a place of learning and solace, a place to remember, to reflect and to engage in important discussions that help change America. This was a horrible act, but it is a stark reminder of why our work is so important."

***

Whether used in remote backwoods, on the side of a bridge, or on a courthouse lawn, the lynch rope is one of this nation's most compelling and enduring symbols of lynching.

A public act of violence, lynching involves vigilantes that are seldom charged with a crime, pursuit of a victim, rationalization for violent behavior, and objects of restraint and torture. The lynch rope is an object that underscores white supremacy as a system of terror to which African Americans were subjected from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.

Today, lynching is a sensitive issue about which people and communities often refuse to speak. The silence is due largely in part to the vile, profane, and criminal nature of lynching and to the awareness among many African Americans, historians, and others that these acts of terror were widespread and sanctioned by law enforcement and everyday citizens-men, women, and children. Many documented cases reveal that spectators of these atrocious events even celebrated lynching.

In light of recent acts of racial intimidation involving the hanging of nooses in public spaces, people must begin to speak candidly about the practice of lynching in hopes it can become common knowledge for everyone seeking an end to racial hatred. This article about the remnant of rope, or noose, used to lynch twenty-three year old Matthew Williams in 1931, underscores lynching and present-day noose hanging as part of a historical continuum of racial violence and intimidation that has been with the nation since its inception.

A piece of the lynch rope used to hang Matthew Williams (1908 - 1931) in Salisbury, Maryland is on display in the exhibition, Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876-1968. The rope serves as a symbol of the racial terror inflicted upon African Americans, and sometimes their sympathizers, in the move toward social progress that began during Reconstruction. Despite the ratification of the 14th Amendment granting equal protection under the law to all citizens, lynching became a lethal mechanism of massive resistance to that progress. Throughout the United States, but primarily in southern and border states like Maryland, lynching became an institutionalized method of social control to maintain white authority. For the perpetrators, committing and witnessing lynching served as unifying acts in forging a white identity fueled by a consciousness that could allay internal fears and rationalize external exploitation.

The figures and dates vary, but for roughly 80 years from 1880 to as late as 1960 nearly five thousand lynchings occurred in the United States. As many as seventy-two people were lynched in 1919, the year of the Red Summer race riots, when African Americans fought fiercely to protect their homes and children from white mobs.

Many lynchings were spearheaded by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), but thousands of everyday citizens were willing participants who cheered, smiled, posed for photographs and postcards.They also collected lynching "souvenirs" that often included body parts of the victim and pieces of the lynch rope, not unlike the one used to lynch Matthew Williams on the Wicomico County Courthouse lawn.

After the lynching of Williams, two accounts of the precipitating events emerged. The account of state's attorney Murray Phillips and the local press suggests that Williams had shot and killed his employer Daniel Elliott, who owned a lumberyard and box manufacturing company in Salisbury. After Williams shot Elliot, he allegedly tried to commit suicide, which accounted for the bullet wound to his head that landed him in Peninsula General Hospital a few short blocks away.

Another widely believed account emerged based on interviews given by both black and white citizens then and years later. This account, documented in Sherrilyn Ifill's On the Courthouse Lawn, holds that Elliot's son James shot both his father and Matthew Williams.

"The prevailing view is that Williams gave James Elliot some money he had saved on the agreement that James would repay the sum. When James refused to return William's money, Williams took the matter to the elder Elliot, with whom he was close. Williams had been his trusted employee since Williams was a teenager. The father reportedly berated his son and demanded that he repay Williams. James Elliot was supposed to return Williams' money that Friday, the day Williams was lynched. Instead James arrived with a gun, shooting his father and Williams, concocting the story that Williams had shot Daniel Elliot and then turned the gun on himself" (Ifill 46).

The only thing known for certain is that Williams, who had no history of violence or instability, would never have his day in court. Around 7:30 that evening, a group of white men congregated on street corners around the courthouse square, convinced that Williams had murdered Elliot. They soon began a march to the hospital where Williams lay critically wounded from the gunshot to his head.

When the crowd arrived, several police officers blocked the entrance to the hospital. The mob then went to a side door, where the superintendent nurse Helen Wise allowed several men to take him. They tossed Williams out the window of the first floor and dragged him several blocks toward the courthouse. The crowd grew as white residents darted from their homes and businesses to join the procession.

While Williams struggled to stand, someone from the mob stabbed him repeatedly with an ice pick. He arrived at the courthouse bloody, unconscious, and stripped of skin from his rear. Several men from among a massive hoard of onlookers then slung a rope over a tree and hanged Williams.

After being hoisted and lowered several times, Williams' body was dragged to the bridge over the Wicomico River, tied to a lamppost, doused with gasoline, and set on fire. His body was left to hang as a warning to the African American community to always stay in their place. Several of the lynchers eventually dumped the severely charred body on the outskirts of town. Salisbury undertaker James Stewart collected the body for ceremony and burial.

Newspapers around the country reported the lynching. The Baltimore Sun included H. L. Mencken's scathing critique of the event, of local officials, and of local newspaper coverage. Mencken's article was coupled with Edmund Duffy's illustration of a lynched Matthew Williams.

Sherrilyn Ifill writes that "Pieces of the rope used on...Williams were kept by townspeople and displayed in the days after the lynching" (60). That same rope would find its way into the hands of a Baltimore Afro American photojournalist, who arrived in Salisbury that night to cover the story.

Paul S. Henderson (1899 - 1988) had been reporting for the Baltimore Afro-American for only two years when he was assigned to cover the lynching of Matthew Williams. He had begun documenting political, educational, religious, and social events in and around Baltimore City, a focal point of twentieth century civil rights activities. His poignant images, most of which the Maryland Historical Society acquired, are now considered a national treasure. His racial segregation images depicting key leaders, sit-ins, marches, and boycotts provide an unsurpassed visual record of the Civil Rights movement in Baltimore from 1933 to 1964.

Mrs. Jacquelyn Cornish, the executor of Paul Henderson's estate, presented the museum with a shoebox that contained the piece of lynch rope. Mrs. Cornish recalled Henderson's explanation of how he had acquired the rope. When Henderson arrived at the final lynching site (hours after the lynching on the courthouse lawn), the mob was still toying with the body and passing out pieces of the rope. As a light-skinned African American, Henderson could pass as a white person. Despite the risk to his own life, Henderson bravely stood on the periphery of the mob and acquired the remnant of rope.

Various individuals and organizations provided leadership to stop lynching. After three of her friends who owned People's Grocery Company were lynched in Memphis in 1892 for competing with white businesses, Ida B. Wells became a leading anti-lynching activist, adding to her crusade for justice in all areas of African American life. Also, the NAACP, founded in 1909, made thorough investigations of lynchings and other crimes committed against African Americans and publicized their findings. In 1919 the NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918, which revealed the accusations related to lynching and the circumstances under which the crimes occurred. Beginning in 1921, the NAACP sponsored anti-lynching legislation, such as the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill and numerous other proposals to make lynching a federal crime. All were defeated.

Beginning in the early 1900s, some southern white organizations began to condemn lynching. They included the Commission for Interracial Cooperation formed in 1919 and led by white male ministers, academics, and businessmen. They researched and published their findings on lynching. The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was founded in 1930 and led by Jesse Daniel Ames, a white scholar and organizer.

Further, in 1935 Walter White and Mary McLeod Bethune made attempts to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to support the Costigan-Wagner Bill, a piece of anti-lynching legislation that proposed federal trials for any law enforcement officers who failed to exercise their responsibilities during a lynching incident. The Costigan-Wagner Bill received support from many members of Congress, but the southern opposition managed to defeat it. Not until 2005 did the United States Senate formally apologize for failing to act on roughly 200 pieces of anti-lynching legislation.

Lynching remains a critical issue that forces this nation to confront its history of violence against African Americans. But only in understanding this history can we predict and prevent the shameful acts of terror and intimidation that are blatantly on the rise today. Lynching and present-day noose hangings are part of a historical continuum of racial violence that has characterized the nation from the beginning.

Speaking truthfully about the nature of history, South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu once stated simply and succinctly, "The past refuses to lie down quietly." May this nation, too, refuse to rest in the fight to guarantee all its citizens equal protection under the law.

Written by Tulani Salahu-Din, Museum Specialist, Office of Curatorial Affairs

Published on July 6, 2017

Resources

Allen, James. Without Sanctuary. Lynching Photography in America. Twin Palms Publishers, 1999.

"Eyewitness Tells How Mob Acted," Afro-American, December 12, 1931.

"Man's Toes Cut off by Mob at Salisbury," Afro-American, December 19, 1931.

Cutler, James. Lynch Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States. New York: Longman, Green, and Co., 1905.

Ifill, Sherrilyn. On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007.

Maryland Historical Society. Paul Henderson Photograph Collection, 2014

NAACP Costigan-Wagner Act

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: The Lynch Law In All Its Phases. 1892.

White, Walter. " I Investigate Lynchings" American Mercury, January, 1929.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Just as this essay on the lynching of Matthew Williams was being finalized for publication, someone deposited a rope noose in the Museum. The noose was discovered by visitors on May 30, 2017 in the exhibition, Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation.

# data[].attributes.body
According to JAKE BLEIBERG and JIM MUSTIAN , A Louisiana state trooper pummled and black man and beat up at least three. This action was not needed. He said that they had been refusing to be arrested. The trooper was fired the next day. As he should be. My thought is why are officers still doing this. What goes through there head? How many officers are racsit? It makes you think about how there is still things going on like this. My mind scrambles every where when it comes to this.

# data[].attributes.body
In the article titled, “Vile US History of Lynching of People of Color,” written by Russel  Contreras on June 15, 2020, we learn about the history of lynching. In the article it discusses how lynching started with native Americans and black slaves. When white people first came to the country people of all races were lynched. Towards the 1800’s it became specifically racist and black people and Mexican Americans were treated horribly. They were lynched and burned with their killers having no criminal punishment. This article has helped me understand how horrible black people were treated at this time. I made a connection with this article that we have experienced a privileged life unlike black people.

# data[].attributes.body
Lynchings in America.

The history of lynching was a horrendous act of violence against people of color. Notice how I didn’t simply put black people? That’s because lynchings happened to all sorts of POC’s, especially immigrants. Sometimes even white people were lynched for being anti-lynching. I was mortified by the information I learned from my articles, they provided gruesome images so the readers really understand what happened. An inhumane fact I learned was that it was common for people to send postcards with a lynching in the background to family. As I read, I  learned there was much more to a just a hanging in a lynch, but physical torment and brutal torture. All sorts of painful experiences like being burned alive, stabbed, dismembered, and drowned; of course that isn’t all, but a good summary. I believe schools need to go into farther depths of this topic, this is something generations ahead need to learn so we do not repeat it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
the george floyd protest vs the civil rights protests.

# data[].attributes.headline
Police Brutality Against Black People in America -Max

# data[].attributes.subject
Police Brutality Against Black People in America -Max

# data[].attributes.body
In the article titled The history of police brutality against black people in America by Amani Hughes the author speaks about how police officers treat people of color unfairly in the way that they judge the black man as “dangerous” and assume they are “up to no good”. They state some evidence that during the anti-drug war of 1986 people officers would target inner city black neighborhoods instead of major white drug usage places such as universities because they weren't interested in them, they wanted to arrest the people of color.
I agree with all of this from my own experiences i had in north Omaha. I lived there for seven years and I have had to protect my friends from the police. I was walking home from school with my friend who was a person of color and a police officer pulled up next to us. When I noticed him I had my friend give me all of her stuff because my mom warned me about the police brutality. He looked through our stuff and left. My friend could have died that day and I know she could have. My mom taught me to think this way because she watched a white police officer lure a black man behind the store and beat him. My mom recorded the whole thing. Yes not “all” cops are bad, but the system is. We haven't really changed much for the sixties from this aspect. And that's really sad.

# data[].attributes.body
In the article entitled "How white Americans used lynchings to terrorize and control black people” by theguardian.com, 2018. In the article they talk about how, what, and why. They state that it was mainly black people that were targeted. They said they would mainly hang black men if there was a sexual transaction between them and a white female, white men would take it into action to kill the black man. They also said in the article that According to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), nearly 25% of lynching victims were accused of sexual assault. Nearly 30% were accused of murder. This really makes me feel that back in the day white people didn’t were very tunnel visioned feeling, they went straight and did what they want, and didn’t try to find the truth. Also makes me feel as if they were brain washed. Another thing makes me think if we all went back then, would we be the same or different?

# data[].attributes.body
My article is ,The Grisly Story of One of America’s Largest Lynching,Erin Blakemore, published on Oct 25, 2017. This article is about one of the largest lynchings in America. This lynching wasn’t against a black man, but an Itailan man who murdured a police officer. From this murder an outcry oucccured. Mobs of angry New Orleans inhabitants broke into the police department, finding any Italian immigrants they could. Some were shot, and some were hung. The Italian government wanted punishment for the mobs, but people in the north applauded the killings. The killer of the policeman, David Hennessy, was never discovered. After reading this article it made me think that not just colored people were lynched, but more groups of people were. This made me think about how many groups of people were lynched. I also want to know how many total people died from lynchings in America.

# data[].attributes.body
In the article entitled “Pregnancy Discrimination Persists in America. It’s Time for Congress to Address it” by Economic Security News on October 31, 2019, readers learn about how pregnancy discrimination is still a thing. On October 31, 1978 president Jimmy Carter signed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. This act forbids any discrimination against pregnancy when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, such as leave and health insurance, and any other term or condition of employment. There is still a problem with this though. Many women have told their stories about their experiences with this. One of those stories was about a woman named Michelle Durham. She became pregnant six months after starting a job as an EMT, and she asked to be temporarily reassigned. She ended up losing her job. Many women have had similar experiences. When I was reading this it made me feel really bad for the women who had to go through all of this. It also made me mad because this is an actual thing. I read somewhere else that people are working on it and trying to fix it but that doesn’t mean that it won’t continue to happen. It’s honestly very sad that this is even a thing. I hope they get this problem solved soon.

# data[].attributes.headline
   Lynching of African Americans- Elizabeth 

# data[].attributes.subject
   Lynching of African Americans- Elizabeth 

# data[].attributes.body
In the article entitled “How white Americans used lynchings to terrorize and control black people.” By Jamiles Lartey and Sam Morris, written on April 25, 2018.  In the article it talks about why they lynched blacks and how. Also what they did with the bodies afterwards. They talked about what would trigger a lynching, how many happened in America. Where did the lynching take place and who all went to see it. Also how it all ended. This article really interested me because of what all was written and talked about.

What really surprised me was that it said that those African Americans that were in jail, the officer would leave them alone after hearing rumors of the inmate being lynched, so a mob of whites would come and deal with it themselves. They did this before their trials and legal defense would take place. It's really rude of the officers that were protecting the black men to leave them alone to be killed. Two big things that also surprised me was that women would bring their youngest children and pick them up to get a closer look at those who were hanged. The other thing is that the whites would chop off their body parts and keep them as an award or souvenir. They also presented the governor with the heart and liver of a man. Lynching eventually came to an end with the civil rights movement and women also held protest for lynching. One thing that made me mad was the those white people that did all of this, weren't charged with anything . It thankfully came to an end but things like this still are happening around the world. I hope in the future there will be equal rights for everyone.

# data[].attributes.body
These events were in newspapers, and drew large crowds. They often tortured and hurt them before the lynching. They would make fun of them and then kill them

# data[].attributes.body
according to NAACP.org, around 4,743 lynchings occurred between the years of 1882 and 1968 caused by fake accusations by racist whites who felt a sense of white supremacy. these mainly started when a black was accused of murder, arson, robbery, rape, vagrancy, and so much more when in reality, these things never happened.