7/23/2022 0 Comments How White Americans Employed Lynchings To Intimidate And Subjugate Black PeopleThe Guardian is currently in Montgomery, Alabama, to cover the opening of the first American memorial dedicated to murder victims. The legacy of such horrific assassinations is generally overlooked. What was the purpose of lynchings?Historical scholars generally believe that lynchings served as a method of social and racial control meant to terrorize black Americans into submission, and in a sub-par racial caste position. They were prevalent throughout the US south from 1877, when post-civil war reconstruction was completed, until 1950. A typical lynching is one that involves criminal charges, often suspicious against the black American, an arrested, and the formation of the term "lynch-mob" with the intention to subvert the normal legal process of judicial review. Go here: housing discrimination for details. Victims would be taken away and subjected kind of physical torture which would typically end with being hung from a tree, then burned to death. Usually, victims were broken up so that the mob could take bits of their bones and flesh to keep as souvenirs. Many times law enforcement agencies were involved in assisting and assisting mobs. In reality, many of these cases were often involving the same people. After rumors of a lynching circulated, officers often leave an inmate's room unguarded in order to let a mob kill him or her prior to any trial or legal defense could be started. What is the trigger for a lynching? One of the biggest violations, though sometimes actual but generally imagined, was any claim of having experienced sexual relations with black women and men. The trope of the hypersexual and lascivious black male, particularly in relation to the inviolable chastity of white women, was and remains one of the longest-lasting stereotypes of white supremacy. According to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) about 25% of victims of lynching were charged with sexual assault. About 30% of victims were charged with murder. "The mob determined that the lynching should have a significance that transcended the particular act of punishment," wrote the historian Howard Smead in Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker. "The mob made the act as a symbol of rites where the person of color was the representative of his race. The black victim was being punished for multiple crimes... This was a message that black people should not contest the supremacy of white people." How many people lived in America? There was no central system for tracking due to the fact that summary executions were not subject to court documents. Many historians believe that this is the reason why the real number of lynchings drastically under-reported. The archives of the Tuskegee Institute compiled 4,743 deaths at the hands of US lynch mobs between 1881 and 1968, a record that lasted many decades. According to the Tuskegee figures, 3,446 of the victims of lynching were black Americans. The EJI, which relied on the Tuskegee numbers in building its own count, also incorporated additional sources, like archives of newspapers and other records from the past for a total of 4,084 racial terror lynchings in 12 southern states between end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, with another 300 across other states. Unlike the Tuskegee data, the numbers from EJI attempt to exclude incidents they deem to be as acts of "mob violence" that followed a legitimate criminal trial process or that "were committed against minorities that did not involve any threat of violence".
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