The legal definition of lynching is when three or more persons, which constitute a
mob, put someone to death extra-legally without court sanction,
without legal sanction, and they do it for the purpose of tradition and/or
whatever their version of justice is.
And this becomes a legal definition by the 1920s of the NNACP.
And their struggle, of course, against lynching and trying to make lynching a
federal crime.
Lynching actually begins in the Revolutionary War years and it's named
after the brother of the man who founded Lynchburg, Virginia. And lynching took
place--this is extra legal justice in quotes--takes place during that period of
time because it's not too many courts. It's sort of difficult to get to them.
This is a period--the British are also in place and many places in the South--and
so it becomes very dangerous to move around. And so this is a form of justice--
of local justice--that is not condoned by a formal court.
It's interesting, it's not until 1886 that the number of Black lynch victims actually exceed the number
of white and lynch victims. So this is an American tradition that becomes
racialized later for a number of reasons.
There's a constant struggle over the meaning of who deserves the protection
and rights that are talked about in the US Constitution. And what happens, of
course, is that one of the functions of a stereotype--of a racial stereotype--is to
show that someone is undeserving of first-class citizenship. And until rather
recently, first-class citizenship was seen not as a right but as a privilege.
And it was a privilege accorded to those with a particular character and who
lived their life in a particular way and had the honor that you are talking about.
This really stymied activism because in the history--African-American history--
there is a--which still exists in some extent--a big conservative element that
really says, "you know if we live our life a certain way, we're going to get--we're
going to become--first-class citizens." You guys, that's what the Constitution says
but it's a privilege it's not a right.
In the late 19th century, an evolving scientific theory claimed that human
beings could be categorized and ranked by such constructs as social standing
and group affiliation. Drawing on Charles Darwin's theory of Biology that the
fittest will survive, this science called Social Darwinism perpetuated various
myths about how societies evolved. One particularly destructive myth was that
Black people were inferior to white people.
And therefore, there was a justification to suppress the advancement in all areas
lest the society, as it whole, be brought down.
There had been prejudices always around color ever since you know the
first Africans came to the US, but they changed. And in the late 19th century,
with the advent of Social Darwinism and the need to think about Black people and
Black labor and Black bodies in a particular way, we begin to see this idea
that Blacks are actually beginning to devolve down the evolutionary scale;
devolve into more primitive identities and with primitive of course as
lasciviousness and lack of control, lack of character, lack of honor, etc. And
scientists actually sought to prove these things empirically. And from there,
they begin to also think about the notion of what is happening to women.
The idea around women's sexuality begins a change in this period of time as well.
This need for this passionless sort of idea of white women who need to
maintain their purity and the purity of the race which is one of the fears, the
Bugaboos, that come up around interracial relationships and this charge of rape.
While there was no shortage of reasons for discrimination against Black people
by white in this period the emerging myth of the threat of the rape of a
white woman by a Black man became a tense focal point and the often false
accusation of rape the chief justification for lynching. One person of
the period to expose this destructive myth was black journalist and anti
lynching activist Ida B Wells. I know Wells was an activist, a woman who
was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862. And in 1892, a very good friend of
hers was actually lynched in Memphis, Tennessee by the name of Tom Moss and
two other men along with him. And what she begins to understand is that
lynching is really taking on a new kind of face quite literally. That blacks are
being victimized now in greater numbers. And the reason that is given for this
rise in lynchings which reaches a peak in 1892 is the accusation that Black men
are raping white women.
And she says it's new because there's there's no history of this in the
numbers that people are professing. She knows that Thomas Moss certainly hasn't
and there's a whole history, there's a reason why he was lynched. He was
actually competing successfully with another what would the white store owner.
So what she does which is really makes her so interesting I think an activist
is she becomes an investigative reporter. And so when she starts talking against
lynching it's not she's just not giving an opinion she's actually going to the
sites of lynchings. She's using statistics that other people also use to
disprove the idea. By simply finding out instances when there was a charge of
rape that often they were just consensual relationships between Black
men and white women.
And that in and of itself just it turns the world upside down because if it's
consensual, Black men aren't monsters as even now the social scientists are saying.
If it's consensual, white women aren't desexualized and innocent of any kind of behavior or
and in need of all this protection which Black people are being killed
in the name of. So, it's a notion that really involves all them and they're all
often dependent on the other and defined in opposition to the other.
You can't have white people if you don't have black people, right? With all the
characteristics that are also defined in opposition to one another.
I mean this is one reason why you have to have lynching that even segregation
there's too much equality. I mean, there's just you have to have something that
really distinguishes white people from Black people and having Black peoples
be lynch victims and white people are able to be the spectators--now that's
different. Now that is a difference that is consistent.
According to the Tuskegee Institute, from 1882 to 1951, 4730 people,
mostly Black, were lynched in the United States. They were tortured, hanged, burned
alive, dragged behind trucks, and in several cases there bodies were
dismembered and the pieces either discarded or kept by many as souvenirs.