The Muckrakers and Lynching: A Case Study in Racial Thinking (original) (raw)
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The Issue of Race and Lynching
2010
Decades before Alice Walker coined the term womanist that Katie Geneva Cannon and others appropriated theologically, Wells’s tenacity to investigate lynching was, from my vantage point, a gift from God. In fact, her ability to find “truths where everyone else seems afraid to look”1 is a trait typically shared among individuals who deliberately probe beneath the surface of an issue in order to better understand how the interrelatedness of various dynamics of race, gender, and lynching operate to obscure lessons about strength and hope. For this reason, Wells was convinced that “the A fro-American papers are the only ones which will print the truth, and they lack means to employ agents and detectives to get at the facts. The race must rally a mighty host to the support of their journals, and thus enable them to do much in the way of investigation.”2
Populism and Black Lynching in Georgia, 1890-1900
Social Forces, 1992
This research tests general claims of how political and economic competition affected county-level variation of black lynching rates in Georgia in the 1890s. The central argument is that rates of racial violence rose when interracial competition increased. This increase was due primarily to black migration to southern manufacturing areas, black participation in the cotton economy, and the rise of black participation in the Populist movement. To address morefully the politicalfacet of interracial competition, wefirst analyze theforces leading to the Populist movement. Wefind that black counties and counties with a higher degree offarm tenancy were more likely to have supported Populist candidates, and that manufacturing counties were less likely to vote Populist. IA4en we analyze the causes of lynching, we find that lynching rates increased when economic competition increased, but that counties that voted Populist did not have significantly higher rates of black lynching. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), between the years of 1889 and 1900, 3,224 people in the U.S. fell victim to the hands of lynch mobs.' Of these victims, 2,522, or 78.2%, were black. Lynching represents an extreme form of racial violence, and the study of the phenomenon allows for comparison with other analyses about different forms of racial or ethnic violence. This project applies general arguments about racial violence as a function of intergroup competition for economic and political resources to black lynching in Georgia in the late nineteenth century. Historical and sociological explanations for lynching and other forms of racial violence are varied, but historians and sociologists agree that forces that increased competition between groups for economic and/or political resources heightens intergroup antagonism (
Improving Lynching Inventories with Local Newspapers: Racial Terror in Virginia, 1877–1927
Current Research in Digital History, 2019
Lynching inventories are fundamental tools to measure the extent and trends of lethal mob violence against alleged criminals during the post-Reconstruction era in the United States. The digital history project "Racial Terror: Lynchings in Virginia, 1877-1927" revisits the Beck-Tolnay inventory of Southern lynchings, the most comprehensive and accurate scholarly catalogue of lethal mob violence in the Deep South. Focusing on lynching in Virginia, this project uses local, rather than national, newspapers as its main source of information. Importantly, the use of local sources reveals that white victims of lynching in Virginia have been overcounted in lynching inventories. This is a significant finding because lynching apologists often used white lynching victims to defend lethal mob violence arguing that, rather than a tool of white domination, lynching was a legitimate and non-racialized form of "popular justice" against hideous crimes. This project enhances our understanding of lynching as a form of racialized terrorism and recommends the systematic use of local newspapers and sources to correct existing lynching catalogues.
Lynched: The Evolution of Systematic Restraints and Their Use Against People of Color
2019
Different than any other kind of slavery, many history books like to paint the journey of the African Slave as one comparable to others who traveled to America for a new life in the land of milk and honey. Similarly today, the plight and struggle of people of color is seen to be one that has not been influenced by narratives including the systematic burden of a history of oppression. Beginning with American slavery and journeying into the present day, there is obviously an aspect of suppression that is constantly found in every single situation related to people of color. In evaluating the transition between the past and the present it is clear that much of the acts that took place in our American history still take place today, although they are almost unrecognizable because they have morphed into a different life-form. This paper offers a look at systematic restraints that consistently plague people of color in America through the historical lens of Lynching. The terroristic act o...
Lynching and the Revolt against (Legal) Formalism
1969
Sunday, August 28, 2005, was the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till, the African-American teenager from Chicago whose death in the Mississippi Delta became a catalyst for the modern Civil Rights movement. Had he lived, Till would be approaching retirement age, and like many of his generation taking stock of a full life as he prepared for its next stage. Instead, his life was cut short in an instance of vicious brutality that shocked the nation. Many would say that Till was lynched, and that the swift acquittal of the two men accused in the case compounded the failure of due process and equal justice in this “most Southern place on earth.”
Z Magazine, 2002
Starting in the 1890s, African Americans in the North and South, and their white allies, built an anti-lynching movement, which used diverse strategies to confront these outrages. They used not only petitions, letter-writing, marches, and rallies, but also plays, songs, visual art, ...