In order to settle a razor-thin and contested presidential election between the Republican Rutherford B Hayes and the Democrat Samuel Tilden, northern Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the last of the formerly renegade states. The move technically only affected South Carolina and Louisiana but symbolically gestured to the south that the north would no longer hold the former Confederacy to the promise of full citizenship for freed blacks, and the south jumped at the chance to renege on the pledge.
The end of Reconstruction ushered in a widespread campaign of racial terror and oppression against newly freed black Americans, of which lynching was a cornerstone.
The vast majority of lynching participants were never punished, both because of the tacit approval of law enforcement, and because dozens if not hundreds often had a hand in the killing. Still, punishment was not unheard of — though most of the time, if white lynchers were tried or convicted, it was for arson, rioting or some other much more minor offense. Lynchings slowed in the middle of the 20th century with the coming of the civil rights movement.
Also playing a major role was the great migration of black people out of the south into urban areas north and west. The exodus of some 6 million black Americans between and was pushed by racial terror and a waning agricultural economy and pulled by a surfeit of industrial job opportunities.
The year was the first since people began keeping track that there were no recorded lynchings. The end of lynching cannot be said to be purely academic, though. While targeted violence against black people did not end with the lynching era, the element of public spectacle and open, even celebratory participation was a unique social phenomenon that would not be reborn in the same way as racial violence evolved. Despite the shift, the specter of ritual black death as a public affair — one that people could confidently participate in without anonymity and that could be seen as entertainment — did not end with the lynching era.
Generally speaking and especially early on, the white press wrote sympathetically about lynchings and their necessity to preserve order in the south. The Memphis Evening Scimitar published in In the state of slavery he learned politeness from association with white people who took pains to teach him. Since the emancipation came and the tie of mutual interest and regard between master and servant was broken, the Negro has drifted away into a state which is neither freedom nor bondage ….
In consequence … there are many negroes who use every opportunity to make themselves offensive, particularly when they think it can be done with impunity …. We have had too many instances right here in Memphis to doubt this, and our experience is not exceptional. The black press, on the other hand, was arguably the primary force in fighting against the phenomenon. The Memphis journalist Ida B Wells was the most strident and devoted anti-lynching advocate in US history, and spent a year-career writing, researching and speaking on the horrors of the practice.
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Statistics Evaluation of Black Americans' civil rights in the U. Learn more about how Statista can support your business. Tuskegee University. September 25, Number of executions by lynching in the United States by state and race between and [Graph]. In Statista. Accessed November 13, Number of executions by lynching in the United States by state and race between and Statista Inc.. Accessed: November 13, Over a hundred years after Thomas Miles Sr. EJI researchers documented racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between and —at least more lynchings of Black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.
In , EJI supplemented this research by documenting racial 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. Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized Black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.
Instead, many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators including elected officials and prominent citizens for bumping into a white person, or wearing their military uniforms after World War I, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person.
People who participated in lynchings were celebrated and acted with impunity. The report explores the ways in which lynching profoundly impacted race relations in this country and shaped the contemporary geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans.
Most importantly, lynching reinforced a narrative of racial difference and a legacy of racial inequality that is readily apparent in our criminal justice system today. Mass incarceration, racially biased capital punishment, excessive sentencing, disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, and police abuse of people of color reveal problems in American society that were shaped by the terror era.
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