LYNCHING

1. LYNCHING Execution of a person accused of a crime without due process of law An “extralegal” means of enforcing white supremacy Named for Judge Lynch of frontier North Carolina in the 1770s, it was basically the execution of someone accused of a crime before a trial was held or a legal sentence carried out. Victims included both races, but it gradually became an instrument for terrorizing African-Americans in the South. A classic lynching – Emmett Till in 1965 – helped galvanize the modern Civil Rights movement

2. LYNCHING STATISTICS • Between 1882 and 1930, over 4,000 people were lynched, about 80% of them black. • Rate of about one every week from 1895 to 1900. • Worst year was 1892, with 230 (about three per week, or two every three days) • State with highest number was Mississippi, with 452. • Largest single number lynched at one time was 11, in New Orleans

3. Between 1882 (when reliable statistics were first collected) and 1968 (when the classic forms of lynching had disappeared), 4,743 persons died of lynching, 3,446 of them black men and women. Mississippi (539 black victims, 42 white) led this grim parade of death, followed by Georgia (492, 39), Texas (352, 141), Louisiana (335, 56), and Alabama (299, 48). From 1882 to 1901, the annual number nationally usually exceeded 100; 1892 had a record 230 deaths (161 black, 69 white). Although lynchings declined somewhat in the twentieth century, there were still 97 in 1908 (89 black, 8 white), 83 in the racially troubled postwar year of 1919 (76, 7, plus some 25 race riots), 30 in 1926 (23, 7), and 28 in 1933 (24, 4).

4. MEANS OF EXECUTION • Hanging was most frequent form • Often was a public event

5. OTHER MEANS • People were also drowned • Victims were also doused with gasoline and burned as well as hanged • People photographed the events and made postcards out of them

6. EXTRALEGAL TERROR – THE KU KLUX KLAN • Founded as a social club by ex-Confederate soldiers in Memphis in 1865 • Found they could frighten newly-freed slaves in the Union-occupied South while riding at night in bizarre costumes with guns • Suppressed by the federal government through the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1870.

7. DESCENDANT OF SLAVE PATROLS

8. KLAN REVIVALS • 1920s – fear of newly-arriving blacks from the South in the Great Migration and long-standing anti-immigrant feelings fueled a revived and very popular Klan nationwide. Focused on hatred of African-Americans, Catholics and Jews. Faded in 1930s.

9. KLAN REVIVAL – 1950s • Response to Civil Rights movement, esp. Brown v. Board of Education

10. STATUS OF AFRICAN-AMERICANS IN THE SOUTH – TWENTIETH CENTURY • AMBIGUOUS – Despised but indispensable • A rigid social code, backed up by the “Jim Crow laws.” • Light-skinned black people often tried to “pass” for white. • Crime and punishment • De jure (by law) segregation and discrimination in the South • Whites considered the “black” world as outside of polite society. They were fascinated by black music and some prominent men (e.g. Sen. Strom Thurmond who ran for President against Truman in 1948) had black mistresses and had children they either supported secretly or disavowed.

11. MODERN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT • Begins as struggle for freedom, dignity and full citizenship • Influenced all aspects of American life • Transformed politics • Began gradually and builds momentum • Was a popular movement - started and mainly carried out by ordinary people. • Begam with anti-lynching movement in ’30s and ’40s. • Meaning of equality evolved into economic equality as well.

12. PRE-1954 • 1909 – NAACP formed by both blacks and whites, led by W.E.B. DuBois. • Mounted a series of legal challenges to segregation laws that lead to Brown v. Board of Education • 1930s – Anti-lynching legislation proposed but not passed; FDR will not sign it. • 1941 – Discrimination in federal hiring outlawed. • 1948 – Truman ordered integration of military.

13. FIRST PHASE - ORGANIZING • 1954- Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka • 1955-57- Montgomery Bus Boycott – emergence of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Southern Christian Leadership Conference • 1957 – Integration of Little Rock, Ark. Central High School • Resistance to integration – Southern Manifesto, White Citizens Councils

14. REVIVAL of Ku Klux Klan

15. PHASE TWO – NONVIOLENT ACTIVISM • New groups emerged – SNCC, CORE • 1960 – Lunch counter sit-ins • 1961 – Freedom riders • 1962-63 – Integration of state universities in Alabama and Mississippi with federal help • March on Washington – 1963 • Selma-Montgomery March – 1965 • Backlash – Assassinations of civil rights workers and leaders, assasination of Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King in 1968

16. ACHIEVEMENTS OF NONVIOLENT ACTIVISM – DE JURE SEGREGATION ENDS • 24th Amendment passed 1964 – poll tax ended • Civil Rights Act passed 1964, banned all forms of discriminations in public facilities • Voting Rights Act passed 1965 – black voter registrations and elected officials mushroom.

17. THIRD PHASE – GROWING MILITANCY • LONG, HOT SUMMERS – 1965-67 • Riots in Detroit and Newark, 1967 • Black Panther Party formed in 1966. • Emphasis on drive for economic as well as political equality • 1968 – AFFIRMATIVE ACTION President Nixon begins to implement federal affirmative action, as a way to split Democratic coalition. • Supreme Court ends quotas in 1978, other forms of affirmative action remain. • De facto segregation continues in many cities with “white flight” from cities.

18. NEWARK and DETROIT

19. POST-1970s LOSS OF MOMENTUM BUT LIMITED SUCCESS New leaders – Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Barbara Jordan Many black officeholders elected in major cities and in the South By 2000, new prominence of wealthy and/or powerful blacks Since 1980s, huge numbers of African-Americans in prison

20. VISIBLE SUCCESSES

21. RACIAL ISSUESTODAY • New immigration, post-1965 creates more diversity in American society • Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action • Police and racial profiling • Hate crime laws • Continuing economic and educational inequality

22. FORMS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION • Racial quotas – illegal • Recruiting • Race as a weighting factor • “Minority set-asides” for government contracts