At any moment, in a long century between reconstruction and the 1960s, any Black man could be taken by a mob, beaten, castrated, hung, and burned for nothing more than a rumor. Lynchings have been documented in 46 states, but especially in the Deep South this was an ever-present fact of life, inflicting a constant and unrelieved fear on Black people. And for the oppressors of Black people, it was felt as an awful and awesome power that was always there to be used, whenever they chose. The numbers of Black people lynched in these ways is simply not known. From the beginnings of slavery to 1882, no one even bothered to count the numbers of lynchings. Between 1882 and 1930 the documented lynchings of Black people numbered 3,386 —sometimes reaching over a hundred a year (about the number of counties in the Deep South). And many lynchings, obviously, were just never publicly documented in the press. Lynching declined as mechanization, migration, and the great struggles for Black liberation undercut the plantation "way of life." But even then individual lynchings have continued right up to the present (including, for example, the horrific 1998 murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas). And, if anything, the threat of murder facing Black people has hardly disappeared, but has shifted with changes in U.S. society—from vigilante mobs of white "citizens" to the constant murder of Black youth by police acting "under the color of law."
Posted on: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 15:32:47 +0000
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