Horrific, indeed...and, unacceptable. But, our history includes similar horrific acts.
Lynching in the United States, From Wikipedia
Lynching was/is the practice of murder by extrajudicial action. Lynchings in the United States rose in number after the American Civil War in the late 1800s, following the emancipation of slaves; they declined after 1930 but were recorded into the 1960s. Lynchings most frequently targeted African American men and women in the South. They were most frequent from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in 1892. Starting with large mob actions attended by hundreds or thousands of watchers, lynchings in the 20th century began to be conducted secretly by small groups of people. Lynchings were also common in the Old West, where Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese were the primary victims.
After the Reconstruction era, most of the South was dominated politically by Democrats. Lynchings enforced white supremacy and intimidated blacks by racial terrorism. The rate of lynchings in the South has been strongly associated with economic strains, although the causal nature of this link is unclear. Low cotton prices, inflation, and economic stress are associated with higher frequencies of lynching.
The granting of U.S. Constitutional rights to freedmen after the American Civil War was resisted by many white Southerners. Some blamed the freedmen for their own wartime hardships, and post-war economic losses, and loss of social and political privilege. During Reconstruction, freedmen and whites working for civil rights were attacked and sometimes lynched. Black voting was suppressed by violence. White Democrats regained control of state legislatures in 1876, and a national compromise resulted in the removal of federal troops from the South in 1877. In later decades, violence continued around elections until blacks were disenfranchised by the states across the South from 1890 to 1908.
White Democrats enacted segregation and Jim Crow laws to enforce blacks' second-class status. During this period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lynchings reached a peak in the South. Florida led the nation in lynchings per capita from 1900-1930. Georgia led the nation in lynchings from 1900-1931 with 302 incidents, according to The Tuskegee Institute. Lynchings peaked in many areas when it was time for landowners to settle accounts with sharecroppers.
There is no count of recorded lynchings which claims to be precise, and numbers vary depending on the source, years considered, and definition used in defining an incident. The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites being lynched between 1882 and 1968, with the annual peak occurring in the 1890s, at a time of economic stress in the South and political suppression of blacks.[8] A five-year study published in 2015 by the Equal Justice Initiative found that nearly 3,959 black men, women, and children were lynched in the twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. Over this period Georgia's 586 lynchings led all states.
African Americans mounted resistance to lynchings in numerous ways. Intellectuals and journalists encouraged public education, actively protesting and lobbying against lynch mob violence and government complicity. Anti-lynching plays and literary works were produced. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and related groups, organized support from white and black Americans, publicizing injustices, investigating incidents, and working for passage of federal legislation. African-American women's clubs raised funds and conducted petition drives, letter campaigns, meetings and demonstrations to highlight the issues and combat lynching. In the Great Migration, particularly from 1910 to 1940, 1.5 million African Americans left the South, primarily for destinations in northern and mid-western cities, both to gain better jobs and education and to escape the high rate of violence. From 1910 to 1930 particularly, more blacks migrated from counties with high numbers of lynchings.
From 1882 to 1968, "nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, and three passed the House. Seven presidents between 1890 and 1952 petitioned Congress to pass a federal law." None succeeded in gaining passage, blocked by the Solid South - the delegation of white Southerners in the Senate. During the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement, black activists were attacked and murdered throughout the South. The 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner galvanized public support for passage of civil rights legislation that year and the next.
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