Lynching

2 Pages 539 Words

Lynching is the illegal execution of an accused person by a mob. It was originally a system of punishment used by whites against African American slaves. Lynching was a practice all too common in the United States. Lynching is most often associated with race relations after the end of the civil war and the destruction of slavery. Lynching was a form of terror used to suppress the minority African-American population. Lynching occurred in all parts of the nation. The effort to outlaw of lynching was a political cause of generations. African-Americans, the most common victims of lynch law, led the fight to outlaw the practice.
The United States has a brutal history of domestic violence. It is an ugly episode in our national history that has long been neglected. Of the several varieties of American violence, one type stands out as one of the most inhuman chapters in the history of the world—the violence committed against Negro citizens in America by white people. This unit of post Reconstruction Afro-American history will examine anti-Black violence from the 1880s to the 1950s. The phenomenon of lynching and the major race riots of this period, called the American Dark Ages by historian Rayford W. Logan, will be covered.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the lynching of Black people in the Southern and border states became an institutionalized method used by whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy. In the South, during the period 1880 to 1940, there was deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro which led white mobs to turn to “lynch law” as a means of social control. Lynchings—open public murders of individuals suspected of crime conceived and carried out more or less spontaneously by a mob—seem to have been an American invention.
Lynchings occurred throughout the United States; it was not a sectional crime. However, the great majority of lynchings in the United States took place ...