Character Of Lynching
This paper talks about lynching and Jim Crow America. While writing this paper, I have thoroughly studied the book "Southern Horrors and Other Writings The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells", 1892-1900, ed. by Jacqueline Royster, besides other resources.
Lynching was an important extralegal aspect of the Jim Crow system that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Between 1880 and 1930 more than 3,200 African Americans were lynched in the South; at its height in 1892, lynching claimed the lives of 230 African Americans in a single year. White mobs seized, hung, shot, and often sadistically tortured and burned blacks who transgressed Southern norms for proper docility. Southern whites typically rationalized lynching by viewing it as a community response to black men's attacks on white women's sexual purity, but the victims of lynching were too varied a group, including black women and children, to be accounted for by such claims.
There was no social movement against lynching at first as there were only isolated, courageous opponents. Initially, opponents spoke carefully, appealing to the Christianity of their white audience. Opposition to lynching grew after 1890, even in the face of white solidarity that made it dangerous to question the practice. Black women were among the first Southerners to speak out. Over time they called upon white women to control the violence and lawlessness of white men. Frances E.W. Harper, a black lecturer and writer, spoke of "the pride of Caste which opposes the spirit of Christ," and called upon white Southerners to embrace the golden rule, "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do you even so to them."
A close eye on history divulges that, in 1892, the lynching of three black residents of Memphis, Tennessee, prompted Ida B. Wells, a black journalist and a friend of the three victims, to begin a crusade against racially motivated mob violence. Her efforts...
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