Racially Motivated Lynchings In The U.S.

Posted: 2/21/2015

Prologue

Not to be misunderstood every mob lynching is horrible and unjustifiable! It is an inexcusable crime irrespective who the victim is.

Trigger

Just read this New York Times article “When Americans Lynched Mexicans”. Here we read “THE recent release of a landmark report on the history of lynching in the United States is a welcome contribution to the struggle over American collective memory. Few groups have suffered more systematic mistreatment, abuse and murder than African-Americans, the focus of the report.

One dimension of mob violence that is often overlooked, however, is that lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially, Mexicans.” (emphasis added)

I am glad someone points out that not only African-Americans were lynched in those days but as the author said other “other racial and ethnic minorities”. One also notices that Italians (whites) are also mentioned (E.g. a new historical video by PBS about Italian immigrants mentions that a dozen or more Italians were lynched by a mob in New Orleans around 1890 and that this was not an isolated incident.).

I have previously blogged about lynchings in the U.S. here. In this blog, I have analyzed the statistics and also noted that over 1,000 whites were reported to have been mob lynched during the same decades.

The Landmark Report

The above mentioned 25 page long “landmark report” titled “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror” was published by the Alabama based Equal Justice Initiative. New York Times also reported about it here. This report is tendentious and biased in various ways or shall we say racially motivated.

This report only focuses on lynchings of African Americans and only in southern states. Where there no whites or other minorities lynched during this generally more brutish time?

The language of this report is filled with the word terror like “terror lynchings” or dramatizations such as “near lynchings” to describe when African Americans migrated north to escape racism. Capital punishment, in the same vein, is compared to an extension of lynchings.

To quote a highlight from this report: “EJI has documented 3959 lynchings of black people in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, which is at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously reported.” This amounts to just 54 persons lynched per year spread over those twelve states. These new number are not very different from previously reported ones. The report also breaks the numbers down by state and county and as per 100,000 population. I might be mistaken, but it cannot be stressed enough that lynchings of African-Americans apparently rarely happened outside these 12 states or in the large, remaining U.S.

One of the interesting parts of this report was the way too short chapter on how African-Americans were actively opposing lynchings. Besides boycotts, hiding or protecting victims, revenges and other protest measures, African-Americans also “engaged in armed self-defense”. However, the report does not describe latter in any detail.

Lynchings Were Highly Concentrated Within States

Further, the Equal Justice Initiative also published lynching numbers by the top 25 counties of those 12 states. It turns out that it appears as if lynchings were highly concentrated in a few counties: E.g. Mississippi state with 576 total lynchings was the second ranked among all 12 states, but 95 lynchings or 16% were committed in only 5 counties. Today, Mississippi has a total of 82 counties. Similar, Louisiana with 540 total lynchings ranked 3rd, but 202 or 37% of lynchings were committed in 6 parishes. Today, Louisiana has a total of 64 parishes.

Why were there not more lynchings in the other counties, because there were no or few African-Americans living there? Where there counties in those 12 states without any such lynchings, why? The landmark report does not give answers.

How Many Whites Were Lynched?

One gets the impression from following these lynching related reports and news media coverage that basically only non-whites or comparatively few numbers of whites were lynched during the 1870-1950 period.

Is this underlying or implied presumption correct or are these reports racially motivated in a sense to stress certain lynchings and ignore other lynchings occurring around the same time.

I did not have the time to investigate this issue further. However, my hunch is that the numbers of whites being lynched were never well researched or are underreported for various reasons. E.g. one reason we know so much about black lynchings is because many of them were extensively photographed (even by professional photographers, because they were e.g. announced beforehand in newspapers) and the pictures were sold or mailed as postcards etc. Did something similar happen when whites were lynched?