Lynching

The Era of Lynching

Between 1880 and 1930, an estimated 3,220 blacks and 723 whites were lynched in the South. The actual number of lynchings may be much higher because accurate records are not available for each year, and many deaths may have gone unreported. Regardless, the staggering number of African Americans killed by angry mobs demonstrates a deep and troubling connection between race and vigilante violence.

Lynching victims met their deaths in a variety of gruesome ways, including hanging, burning, and beatings. Torture was frequently a part of the ritual of lynching. Victims were sometimes dismembered while still alive, and many male victims were castrated. Members of the mob often took fingers, ears, or other pieces of flesh as souvenirs. African American men were the victims of the vast majority of lynchings. However, women, even pregnant women, occasionally fell prey to ruthless lynch mobs as well.

The lynching of blacks was a rare occurrence during the slavery era. Because slaves were viewed as valuable pieces of property, lynching and killing them went against the economic interests of the region's powerful slaveowners. The era of lynching only began after the emancipation of slaves, and a huge upsurge in the number of lynchings occurred at the end of the Reconstruction era.

Reconstruction was the period immediately following the Civil War, when Union troops continued to occupy the South, setting stipulations for the treatment of the former slaves and for the reentry of the Southern states into the Union. When Northern troops withdrew from the region after Reconstruction ended in 1877, white Southerners quickly set about restoring “home rule.” Lynching became one of the [Page 513]tools used to terrorize and subjugate the newly freed slaves.

Southern whites quickly managed to deprive the former slaves of the right to vote, which black males had enjoyed during Reconstruction. In addition, Southern legislatures began passing laws in the 1890s that legally segregated whites and blacks, confining African Americans to separate cars on trains, separate schools, separate restroom facilities, and so on. Lynching and the threat of lynching were designed to force African Americans to accept these restrictions and to abandon much of the freedom they had gained at the end of the Civil War.

Explanations for Lynching

Scholars have struggled to explain not only the prevalence of lynching but also the extent to which it became socially acceptable in the South. Sometimes, lynchings were well publicized in advance, and large crowds would gather to watch the gruesome event. The victims of lynchings were sometimes memorialized on postcards, and grisly souvenirs of lynchings were sometimes put on public display. Although some white Southerners may have privately opposed lynching, organized white opposition to it did not emerge until the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was established in 1930.

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