The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): Flag Flown outside the window of the New York Headquarters if a Lynching occurred.
American Race Riots: Lest We Forget
America was a very harsh and difficult place for African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. African Americans were up against a society that long held that they were unhuman and soulless. At every turn white America was fed images of African Americans as murderous, deceitful, dangerous people with animal like habits. These ideas carried over from the enslavement of African Americans that existed from 1619 until 1865. After the government sanctioned enslavement of African Americans ended in 1865 and the Reconstruction efforts ended in 1877, the lynching of African Americans became a quintessential past-time of white America. The 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v Ferguson declared “separate but equal” constitutional. This decision left African Americans completely vulnerable to unbelievable discrimination and violence, namely lynching. Why were Black lives considered by so many to be expendable, unessential, unneeded and disposable in America? Lynchings were cruel and heinous acts of terror perpetrated by White Americans to control and retard the social, economic and political advancements in the lives of African Americans. The local, state and federal government encouraged lynchings, physical abuse and discrimination against African Americans by not enforcing the law as well as not passing and enacting Anti-Lynching laws that would have protected the lives, property and civil rights of African American’s against White Americans.
The lynching of an African American person on the lawn of the courthouse would send a power message to other African Americans in the community and across the land. It also sent an equally powerful message to White Americans. It reminded both African Americans and White Americans of their place in society. For African Americans it reminded them and that they were second class citizens and that their lives did not matter and were in danger because the law was not on their side. For Whites it reinforced their knowledge and understanding of white supremacy. White Americans rejected the legal reforms that offered marginalized individuals equal protection under the law and wholeheartedly enacted the unlawful actions of lethal group violence against African Americans, so that social and class hierarchy would continue to keep African American’s in their place and bestow fear into their communities. The courthouse was to be the place that protected all citizens and to administer justice fairly upon all regardless of race. However, justice was to be denied to African Americans in the most despicable way, lynchings.
According to the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018 at least 4,742 people, predominately African Americans, were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968.
MONTGOMERY, AL – APRIL 26: Wretha Hudson, 73, discovers a marker commemorating lynchings in Lee County, Texas while visiting the National Memorial For Peace And Justice on April 26, 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama. Hudson, whose father’s family came to Alabama from Lee County decades earlier, said the experience was overwhelming. “It’s a combination of pride and strength, for my people. In our culture, rain is a sign of acceptance from our ancestors. So the rain is a sign of their acceptance for this day.” The memorial is dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people and those terrorized by lynching and Jim Crow segregation in America. Conceived by the Equal Justice Initiative, the physical environment is intended to foster reflection on America’s history of racial inequality. (Photo by Bob Miller/Getty Images)
If We Must Die
BY CLAUDE MCKAY
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Thomas Shipp & Abraham S. Smith
Thomas Shipp, Abraham S. Smith and James Cameron were arrested and accused of robbery, murder, and rape on August 7, 1930 in Marion, Indiana. A mob of white men kidnapped the men from jail. James Cameron had a rope around his neck but someone stepped in and declared his innocence and he was taken back to jail. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith were hung on the court house grounds. This lynching is said to be the catalyst for the song Strange Fruit by Abel Meerpol.
Elias Clayton, Elmer Johnson, and Isaac McGhie
Three lynched African American men (two hanging from a post or tree, one laying on the ground) surrounded by a crowd of caucasian witnesses. (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Elias Clayton, Elmer Johnson and Isaac McGhie were lynched in Deluth, Minnesota on June 15, 1920. They were accused of robbing and raping a white woman. The men where kidnapped from the jail and lynched on the street corner by a mob of up to 10,000 white men.
Laura Nelson
Laura Nelson and her fourteen-year-old son L. D. Nelson (not pictured) were lynched from a bridge on May 25th, 1911 in Okemah, Oklahoma. They were accused of murdering a deputy sheriff as he allegedly attempted to search their farm for a stolen cow.
George Meadows
George Meadows was lynched by a group of white coal miners on January 15, 1889 in Jefferson County, Alabama. He was accused of raping a white woman and killing her son. However, it was found that he was not the alleged African American man that committed the crime. To further dehumanize Mr. Meadows his body was riddled with bullets, and displayed in the plate glass window at the undertakers.
Lige Daniels
Lige Daniels was lynched on August 2, 1920 in Center, Texas for the murder of a white woman. Mr. Daniels was pulled from the jail and lynched on the grounds of the court house while a crowd of white people looked on.
Reconciliation Day is an annual celebration in South Africa. It start on December 16, 1995.
A great number of historians have suggested that African Americans be compensated financially as descendants of formerly enslaved people and those that suffered under the umbrella of Jim Crow and discrimination. To determine the effects of slavery, Jim Crow and unthinkable atrocities as it relates to discrimination to the persons of African descent, members of Congress have presented a bill called a Commission to Study and Develop Reparations Proposal for African Americans Act since 2013, to research, study and analyze the centuries and current effects of discrimination. While the clock continues to tick on the Bill, civil rights attorney Sherrilyn A. Ifill in her book On the Court House Lawn, has come up with other suitable ways to compensate African Americans for their lost. Her ideas are sound and quite doable. She has studied what other countries and communities have used to address and reconcile cultural and economic challenges of the past that caused great bodily and psychological damage to marginalized ancestor and descendants of a particular area, and region of the world.
Ifill says, “More than just conversation, local individual and community groups and institutions would be empowered to do the work of reconciliation, identifying for themselves appropriate forms of reparations. Rather than being bound to the narrow conception of reparations that dominates discussion of this issue at the national level, local reparation initiatives might take the form of public apologies; expunging the records of or issuing pardons to black lynching victims who were accused of or convicted of crimes they did not commit; the creation of monuments or commemorative public spaces in the community; placing gravestones under the unmarked burial sites of lynching victims; mandatory school programs on the local history of lynching; reopening criminal investigations into lynchings; financial compensation for lynching victims descendants and for those whose family homes or businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of lynching; and institutional reforms focused on the legal system and the media.”
America is a great country and it gets greater every day, however, America has had many great atrocities to occur and no matter how embarrassing and painful they are the facts must be revealed from all perspectives. For years the 1908 Race Riot was silenced by the lack of information and the lack of concern for what happened as was many of the other 4,742 riots and lynchings that happened in America. Silencers are narratives that benefit the perpetrators of the action and their descendants and deflect blame from them onto another or simply away from the truth.
On January 27, 1838 at the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Abraham Lincoln denounced the increase in mob violence. Lincoln believed that, as he said, “When men take it in their heads today, to hang gamblers or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn someone, who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is.” Abraham Lincoln condemned mob action in his day and any such actions today should also be condemned as should the Springfield, Illinois 1908 Race Riot and the 4,742 mob lynchings that occurred in America from 1882 – 1968.
American Race Riots 