Lynchings and racial violence

• Lynching


  The public killing of an individual who has not received due process (a trial)
• 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
• Typical lynching involved

  • Criminal accusation
  • Arrest
  • Assembly of a mob
  • Seizure
  • Physical torment
  • Murder of the victim
• Lynchings were often public spectacles attended by the white community in celebration of white supremacy
• Photos of lynchings were often sold as souvenir postcards
• Crimes used to justify lynchings

  • Perceived sexual transgressions against white women
  • Murder
  • Arson
  • Robbery
  • Vagrancy
• Many victims of lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime
• As Black Americans fled the South to escape the terror of lynchings, a historic event known as the Great Migration occurred
• NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching
• In 1919, NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1919, to promote awareness of the scope of lynching
• From 1920 to 1938, NAACP flew a flag from their national headquarters in New York that bore the words "A man was lynched yesterday"
• National lynching rates declined in the 1930s, a trend that NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White attributed to anti-lynching activism, shifts in public opinion, and the Great Migration
• The first full year without a recorded lynching occurred in 1952
• Walter White, NAACP Assistant Secretary, investigated 41 lynchings through 1927
• The lynching of Mary Turner in Brooks-Lowndes County, Georgia, was one of the lynching investigations by Walter White on behalf of NAACP
• The lynching of Jesse McIlherron was another Walter White investigation for NAACP
• 380,000 Black men served in the US military during WWI
• After WWI, racial violence worsened, the most horrific example being a massacre that took place in East St Louis in 1917 that left over 100 black people dead, and an entire neighbourhood reduced to ashes
• Black soldiers also had a trying experience, as the army remained rigidly segregated and the War Department relegated the majority of black troops to labour duties
• When the war ended, membership in the NAACP skyrocketed
• The death of Charles Lewis was the first ominous warning that Black Americans' service and sacrifice would not be recognized
• In the months following the armistice, racial tensions across the country increased, and race riots erupted across the country, notably in Washington D.C and Chicago
• The "Red Summer" of 1919 marked the culmination of steadily growing tensions surrounding the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North that took place during World War I
• In the aftermath of the rioting in Chicago, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations was organized to investigate the root causes of the riots and find ways to combat them
• President Woodrow Wilson publicly blamed white people for being the instigators of race-related riots in both Chicago and Washington, D.C., and introduced efforts to foster racial harmony