Six Degrees of Segregation: Teaching the Long Civil Rights Movement – Part 3 Justice

1. Six Degrees of Segregation: Teaching the Long Civil Rights Movement – Part 3Justice Yohuru Williams, PhD Vice President for History Education The American Institute for History Education

2. Part 3: Justice • Amendment XIII (1865) • Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

3. Six Degrees of Segregation Jim Crow Justice: Capital Punishment and the Incarcerate State

4. Legal Lynching

5. Jim Crow Justice • From Plantation to Prison • Anatomy of a lynching • Race Riots

6. US v. Harris (1882) • 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).

7. Lynching: Valdosta, Georgia, 1918 • White farmer Hampton Smith was well known for abusing his employees including Black peon Sidney Johnson, whose fine of thirty dollars Smith paid after Johnson was arrested for gaming. After numerous incidents of physical violence and abuse Johnson shot and killed Smith as the later sat in a window at his home. Johnson further wounded Smith's wife in the attack. A mob of white men spent the week of May 17 to 24, scouring the countryside in a hunt for Johnson. Unable to find him in the meantime they lynched 9 innocent persons including Hayes Turner and his Mary Turner who tried to keep the mob from killing her husband.

8. Jim Crow Justice: Lynching • Mary Turner was pregnant and was hung by her feet. Her clothing was doused with gasoline and then she was set on fire. Unsatisfied the mob cut open her body and her infant fell to the ground. The child uttered a little cry before it was purportedly crushed to death under the heel of one of the white men present. The mother's body was then riddled with bullets.

9. Jim Crow Justice influences the Great Migration • The real guilty party Sidney Johnson, was eventually discovered in a house in Valdosta. The house was surrounded by a posse headed by the Chief of Police. Johnson chose to shoot it out with police firing several rounds and wounding the Chief. When he ran out of ammunition the mob entered the house but found Johnson already dead. Not to be denied his body was mutilated. After the lynching more than 500 Negroes left the vicinity of Valdosta, leaving hundreds of acres of untilled land behind them.

10. Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law in Georgia - Chapter I (1899) • “The . . . suspects were not criminals, they were hard-working, law-abiding citizens, men of families. They had assaulted no woman, and, after the lapse of nearly a month, it could not be claimed that the fury of an insane mob made their butchery excusable. They were in the custody of law, unarmed, chained together and helpless, awaiting their trial. They had no money to employ learned counsel to invoke the aid of technicalities to defeat justice. They were in custody of a white Sheriff, to be prosecuted by a white State's Attorney, to be tried before a white judge, and by a white jury. Surely the guilty had no chance to escape.”