An overview of the history of Lynching
in the United States of America
by Maxime Coles MD
The United States has failed to tell the truth about it painful History, on how Slavery has hurt generations of blacks or how Lynching was used as a vicious tool to re-establish control of white supremacy in imposing fear among blacks and minorities. So much has been written about the Great Migration but the truth, about Lynching in a country build on hatred and discrimination, is now more appreciated. We will try to cover more than a century of passionate crimes directed mainly toward Blacks, Mexicans, Native Indians, Whites and minorities like Chinese and East Indians.
For those 4,400 lynching victims, it means a little Justice to the one who lost their lives in the South and the Midwest at the news of a new Monument dedicated to their memories.
Indeed, a monument to the Lynching victims will open to the public on April 26, 2018, in Montgomery, Alabama. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice will become the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation.
The memorial sits fiercely on a grassy hilltop in the city like an invitation to enter each of the 805 rectangular steel slabs (markers), a symbol of each county where a Lynching has occurred. Other slabs are erected outside and around the monument to invite people to claim another site of the killing.
A Smithsonian American Ingenuity Awarded, Stevenson wishes for this Memorial to be a “correction” to begin a conversation rooted on Truth before we can frame a response that heals and repairs the damage of Racial Injustice”.
The Committee on Civil Rights of President Harry S Truman becomes later the Commission on Civil Rights has also failed to resolve mass lynching as well as many isolated cases around the country. Many of the victims will etch to History even if they remained unknown.
It is my privilege to explore this world of lynching in the United States of America.
The Great Migration was spurred by the “Jim Crow Law”, the poverty in the post-civil war and by the Lynchings in the South. Lynching is the practice of murder by extrajudicial action. In the United States, Lynching rose in number after the civil war in late 1800 following the emancipation of the Slaves. Between 1914 and 1918 more than 500000 African Americans left the farms in the South for a better condition of life in the Northern cities.
This movement was part of the Great Migration from 1890 to the 1960 and eventually allowed more than 6 million of blacks to migrate. The flow declined after 1930 but was still recorded after the 1960′s. Northern jobs opened up by thousands. By moving, North did not mean that African American left Racism behind. Many whites resented their presence in the neighborhood so much that in 1915 a movie” the birth of a Nation” portrayed blacks as deranged and dangerous. The racial unrest led to riots.
Lynching has most frequently targeted African American in the Northern states during this Great Migration of blacks with the political goal of promoting White Supremacy and black powerlessness. Pictures of Lynching and photographs were published as postcards and sold in the USA or in a country like Germany to the adepts of the Nazism. People being lynched were occasionally burned alive with body parts amputated kept as souvenirs. Lynchings were frequent from 1890 to 1930 with a peak in 1892. In the 20th century, they were secretly conducted by small groups of people. In the old west, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans were the primary targets.
Lynchings were also associated with inflation and economic distress, like with low cotton prices. Many white southerners resisted the granting of the US Constitutional rights to freedmen after the American civil war until 1877 when the federal troops were removed. Violence continued around elections until blacks were disfranchised by the states across the south from 1890 to 1908.
White Democrats enacted the segregation and brough