Did it ever get passed?
I can’t find any reference to a successful bill in that regard. Yet lynching appears to be firmly a thing of the past. How come?
WAG here, but it seems that killing/maiming/injuring someone was illegal before anti-lynching laws were passed. Makes them a sort of proto-hate crime law sort of thing.
Moral suasion.
As with duels, feuds, and other violent activities, it gradually came to be seen as no longer proper in “civilized” society. It was always against the law as murder (or battery on those occasions when it involved whipping rather than hanging or burning).
I suspect that as the South wanted to attract mre Northern businesses (originally textile mills, later heavy manufacturing), the “city fathers” (who had often participated, themselves) began to decide that it was bad publicity.
Between 1900 and 1925, the NAACP and several other organizations documented the lynchings that had occurred and were continuing and published those findings in several national periodicals, giving the South quite a bit of bad press. (The North was not freee of lynchings, but it was a “Southern” phenomenon.)
The numbers of lynching murders ran over 100 a year until 1902, then dropped to the high double digits until 1935, then fell to the twenties and teens through WWII, then fell off to single digits until the mid-1960s. The most recent lynching, in the 1990s, was carried out by a group of drunks who clearly did not want to be caught or identified–quite a difference from the period 100 years ago when the notable citizens of a communmity might turn out to be photographed at the event (with the photos appearing in the local paper).
No, anti-lynching legislation never passed. The goal of anti-lynching legislation, remember, was to make lynching a federal crime, because local authorities obviously were not going to prosecute in a situation like the one described by tomndebb where the sheriff was posing with the lynch mob for a picture in the local newspaper.
The Tuskegee Institute defined lynching as “the extralegal group killing of individuals in custody or suspected of crime in the name of justice, community, or race”. Even today these circumstances, in and of themselves, will not allow a murder to be prosecuted under federal law.
Nevertheless, as you say, the practice has declined to near (but, sadly, never quite to) zero. Obviously, state and local authorities no longer condone this sort of crime, and the overall social milieu has changed for the better as summarize by tomndebb.
You can see dozens of such photographs at Without Sanctuary
Newspapers sometimes even announced lynchings beforehand. The lynching of Dick Rowland in 1921 was announced the evening before in The Tulsa Tribune in an editorial titled: “To Lynch a Nigger Tonight.”
Participants in lynchings often kept souvineers of the event, which included sections of the rope with which they were hanged, clumps of the victims hair, and in some cases, body parts.
A year or so ago, I did research for a project on this very subject. One of the objects I found online was a framed and matted photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith with a clump of one of the victim’s hair pressed carefully between the matte and the glass, with the owner circled in the group photograph. It boggles the mind to imagine that someone probably once had this hanging in their living room, a macabre souvineer of a murder.
One more thing I’d like to point out.
Anti-lynching legislation was so unpopular that the NAACP produced thispamphlet. You won’t be able to make it out too well in the photograph. It shows Rubin Stacey, who was lynched on July 19, 1935 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The caption reads: “Do not look at this Negro. Instead look at the seven WHITE children who gaze at this greusome spectacle.” The idea that they were trying to get across was that lynching harmed society at large, and not just blacks. Sad to say, but at the time, the idea that the white children were psychologically harmed would have raised more concern than the fact that a black man had been tortured and killed.
Lynching is not a thing of the past in South Carolina.
No, I don’t mean that groups are hanging people from tree limbs. In SC there are laws that call acts of violence by a mob of two or more -lynching.
It is strange to read an article in the local paper that certain persons were charged with second degree lynching when the description of the crime does not include hanging.
I thought that the term only had to do with hanging but not in laws of SC and maybe other places, I don’t know.
Actually, the SC laws simply reflect the older use of the word–not the absence of a hanging, but any (extra-legal) mob action to mete out “justice.”
Before the Civil War, lynch was used as a term throughout much of the South to indicate any punishment inflicted by a mob. It could include whppings or beatings, tar and feathering, hanging, or other acts of violence. The victims could be white or black and the “crimes” could include rape, adultery, insulting the gentry (or whites, if one was black). Black deaths by lynching before the Civil War were rare, since to lynch a black, one had to destroy another’s property. During that period, the whipping of white men for adultery or theft (or for a poor man to insult a rich woman) was not uncommon. The SC laws are probably directed at those actions. After the Civil War, blacks were fair game for lynching (although whites were also so punished, usually for rape or violent theft).
Whites were rarely treated with the sickening brutality that usually accompanied black lynchings. Skinning, castration, burning and other forms of torture were almost never done to whites. White lynchings were usually just a form of mob justice: a whipping, or hanging, whereas blacks were unspeakably mutilated prior to, and after being hanged.
I haven’t done much research into the matter, but I have never come across a white WOMAN being lynched, whereas many black women were. There was a respect for white women that was completely lacking toward black women.
The most horrific lynching of a black woman happened to Mary Turner. In Valsdosta, Georgia, 1919, a white farmer notorious for cheating his black sharecroppers was found murdered by one of the sharecroppers. A mob lynched the culprit, and to drive home their point, lynched ten other black men as well. Mary Turner’s husband was among them. Eight months pregnant at the time, Mary publicly swore to find out who had killed her husband and to swear out warrants against his murderers. This was much too “uppity” for the mob to tolerate, so they hanged her from a tree by her feet, and set her on fire. One man sliced open her stomach, and the eight-month old fetus fell to the ground and was stomped to death by a member of the mob before Mary’s eyes. The child was hanged beside her, and then her life was ended by a barrage of over one hundred bulletts.
This kind of violence would never have been perpetrated against a white person, especially a white woman. However, at the time, blacks held an almost sub-human status. Some whites felt no more guilt over torturing and killing a black person than they would an animal.
When it came to accusations against a black man, the guilt of the victim was not an issue. The accusation was cause enough to kill him. A good example of this is the murder of Joseph Richardson, who was lynched in 1913 for an assault on a white little girl. Commemorative postcards were made showing Richardson’s dangling corpse. Later, it was acknowledged that Richardson had merely tripped in the street and stumbled into the child. Rumors did the rest.
A friend of mine actually served on a jury a few years back in California where one of the crimes the defendant was charged with was lynching.
And the guy was guilty.
In California, lynching is considered “the removal of a person under police custody while engaged in a riot.”
In this particular case, a police officer was shot in the head by a group of gang members who then freed their friend from the police car where he was being held.
They didn’t get far.
And I did not suggest that they had been. I was simply pointing out the development of the word as it appeared in Stellablue’s post and in various state laws that Stellablue noted may still be on the books. Whites were, however, lynched, even in the South.
It is one thing to point out the enormous horror (and deliberate terrorism inflicted by white society) on blacks through lynching. However, ignoring the fact that others were lynched allows some revisionists to claim that it was “merely” used to secure justice and was applied both to blacks and whites. It was not, of course. While some percentage of whites were lynched when accused of crimes, blacks were routinely lynched for no better reason than to terrorize the rest of the black community. In the interest of Fighting Ignorance™, I think it is important to recognize the entire history.
An interesting link:
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/JJ/jcj1.html
It talks about the Waco Horror of 1916. Ironically (or not), I never heard about it when I lived in Waco. It is a gruesome description. I took some later college classes where the professor talked in detail about it. I am googling the topic as I write.
I didn’t mean to imply that at all. I know that whites were lynched. The Leo Frank case is a good example. I was trying to point out the difference in the treatment of the victim.
I agree heartily. I’m sorry if my post was confusing.
A perfect example of the terroism aspect of lynching comes from a 1908 postcard which shows four hanging men. It incorrectly identifies the scene as: “Four Niggers hanged by a mob in the State of Georgia for assaulting a white woman.” Actually, the men were killed for their criticism of the white-run legal system. A note was found pinned to one of the men reading: “Let this be a warning to you niggers to let white people alone or you will go the same way.” On the back of the postcard, the sender wrote that the men had been killed for no apparent crime, possibly meaning that she had not heard that the men had assaulted anyone.
The false information on the card reflects a common justification for lynching in the South: that blacks were sexually uncontrollable brutes who lusted after white women. It fostered the misconception that blacks were lynched predominately for sexual assault, but few victims were accused, or charged with such crimes. Sometimes, blacks were lynched for simply being judged as too “uppity” by the white community, or for complaining about injustices done to them.
The same picture was used on a commemorative postcard issued by the Harkrider Drug Company of Center, Texas, with a poem written below, which I will quote verbatim:
"The Dogwood Tree.
*This is only the branch of the Dogwood tree;
an emblem of WHITE SUPREMECY.
A lesson once taught in the Pioneers school,
That this is a land of WHITE MEN’S RULE.
The red man once in an early day,
Was told by the Whites to mend his way.
The Negro now, by eternal grace,
Must learn to stay in the negro’s place.
In the Sunny South, the Land of the Free,
let the WHITE SUPREME forever be.
Let this a warning to all negroes be.
Or they’ll suffer the fate of the DOGWOOD TREE. *
It’s sadly ironic that they would call the Sunny South the “Land of the Free,” while proudly displaying the handiwork of brutal white oppression.
1908 saw the last of the commemorative postcards of lynchings. On May 27, 1908, an ammendment to the U.S Postal Regulations was passed, forbidding material to be sent through the mail that was “matter of a character tending to incite arson, murder or assasination.” This didn’t stop the souvineer industry-- it just prevented the postcards from being mailed.
Ten years later, when World War I broke out, blacks saw an opprotunity to show their worth through military service. When they returned home after serving their country, it was hoped that their service would help ease racial tensions. They found the exact opposite to be true. Black pride angered white people. An article from * The Property Owner’s Journal * dated March 1919 reads: *
Negroes are boasting, individually and through the colored press, that the old order of things for the Negro is changing and that a new condition is about to begin. As a result of the boastful attitude, the Negro is filled with bold ideas, the realization of which means the overturning of their older views and conditions of life. The Negro is unwilling to resume his status of other years; he is exalting himself with idiotic ideas about social equality.
Keep the Negro in his place, amongst his people, and he is healthy and loyal. Remove him, or allow his newly discovered importance to remove him from his proper environment, and the Negro becomes a nuisance. He develops into an overbearing, inflated, irascible individual, overburdening his brain to such an extent about social equality that he becomes dangerous to all with whom he comes into contact; he constitutes a nuisance of which the neighborhood is anxious to rid itself. If the new Negro desires to display his newly acquired veneer of impudence where it well be appreciated we advise that they parade it in their own district. Their presence here is intolerable. *
Lynchings and the forceful oppression of blacks continued unabated. Jim Crow laws were brutally enforced, in a desperate effort to keep black Americans in “their place.” The South deeply resented any Northern interference in what they saw as their way of life. Politicians that openly endorsed segregationist tickets were supported by the voters.
Lester Maddox, for example, vowed to go to jail in 1964 rather than allow blacks to eat in his Atlanta, Georgia chicken resturant. He handed out axe handles to customers to use to beat any blacks who tried to enter. When he later ran for governor, his campaign materials included a watch, in which the hour and minute hands were the arms of Maddox, holding a leg of chicken in one hand, and an axe handle in the other. He won the election.
The notion of blacks attaining equal rights and social standing as whites was viciously opposed. Civil rights advocates were beaten and murdered. Signs were planted in their yards in Mississippi which read “Death to the Race Mixers! Be a Paul Revere! Fight!Fight!”
It really is astounding, if you think about it, that such things happened less than fifty years ago in our country. We have made amazing strides since then in our efforts at equality and justice, but there is still quite a ways to go.