The Inhumanity of Lynching

by Blaine Varney

Beginning in the 1880s and increasingly into the 1890s, so-called Jim Crow Laws were passed by state governments throughout the South. These statutes effectively segregated Black Americans into separate railroad cars, schools, churches, hospitals, hotels, and eating facilities, and took away their right to vote through the implementation of Grandfather Clauses, poll taxes, literacy tests, property requirements, and other discriminatory regulations.

However, even worse than these "legal" means of keeping African-Americans disenfranchised and disempowered were the clearly illegal practices associated with physical intimidation and violence. Many Whites in the former Confederate States formed local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan and set out on nightly "terror rides" to harass "uppity Negroes" so they would remember their lower rank in the social structure. Sometimes, the Blacks were accused of committing a crime against a white person, such as theft, assault, rape, or murder, but normally, they had to do little more than look the wrong way at a White to prompt an evening visit.

Anything could happen once a mob was called out. If the gang merely wanted to scare the African-American into "behaving properly," it might give him a beating, cut off a finger, burn down his house, or destroy his crops.

In more extreme situations, though, murder was not an unthinkable act, and often, town law-enforcement officials helped by holding the accused in jail until a band could be collected to carry out the murder. The most common form of "lynching," as the group killings were known, was hanging, but individuals were also beaten, burned, stabbed, shot, or slowly tortured to death.

In some cases, especially when the Black was suspected of committing a crime, the lynchings became tremendous public spectacles, with entire families coming from miles away to watch the day's event. More often, the murder was carried out by a small group of Whites late at night, with fewer than 1% of the lynchers ever successfully convicted. Well over 85% of these mob killings occurred in the South, reaching a peak in 1892 when there were 161 lynchings of African-Americans recorded. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, southerners supported the violent actions as the only legitimate means of social control, blaming the necessity on an ineffective justice system. "If criminals were promptly tried and punished for their offenses with a satisfactory degree of fairness and certainty," one newspaperman wrote in 1897, "the lyncher would soon find himself without a job and without encouragement."1

Some Americans, however, were outraged by the lynchings, and first among those speaking out against the violence was Ida. B. Wells-Barnett.

In 1892, when three of her good friends were murdered in Memphis, Tennessee because they had opened a grocery store to compete with a White-owned one, the black journalist began a worldwide anti-lynching campaign that took her all around the United States and Europe. She never once wavered from her belief that "mob rule shall be put down and equal and exact justice be accorded to every citizen of whatever race who finds a home within the borders of the land of the free and the home of the brave."2 Although she was never able to get Congress to pass an Anti-lynching Amendment, Wells-Barnett was successful in drawing attention to the problem, and by the 1930s, lynchings in the South were down to less than ten per year.

Sources for Pictures and Quotations

Contributed by Blaine Varney, American Culture Studies "1890s" course, Spring, 1996