EOTO #2: Lynchings of 19th and 20th century

    Lynchings during the 19th and 20th century represented one of the darkest chapters f racial violence in American history. During this horrific era, lynchings had become a tool to maintain white supremacy by instilling terror through black communities. 

    A lynching was a public killing of an individual who had not undergone due process. Executions were usually carried out by lawless mobs; while police observed these tragedies take place, they would not intervene. The lack of law enforcement allowed these brutal acts to go unchecked. According to the NAACP, there were an estimate of 4,743 lynchings that occurred in the U.s from 1882 to 1968, 72% of the lynchings being targeted towards Africans Americans. Others who were lynched included immigrants from Mexico, China, and other countries, as well as the white people who did not participate in lynching, or tried to help African Americans from being lynched. Common claims and accusations used against Black people were murder, arson, robbery; Black men were typically accused of sexually assaulting white women. 

    Lynchings gained momentum during and after the Reconstruction era as African Americans began to register to vote, were establishing business and began running for public office. "Many whites - landowners and poor whites - felt threatened by this risk in black prominence. Foremost on their minds was the fear of sex between races." Mob kills would carry out extreme brutality towards African Americans such as mutilation, torture, desecration - all of which were advertised in the newspapers and became public spectacles where large crowds of white families would gather and celebrate. 

    As the lynchings continued on, body parts - including genitalia - were sometimes distributed to spectators or put on public display.

Two infamous lynchings - the murder of Emmett Till and William Brown - both illustrate the horrendous lengths lynchers would go through to maintain their racial order.

    First, we begin with the trick case of Emmett Till, a 14 year old African American teenage boy from Chicago. IN 1955, Till would be accused of whistling at a white female store clerk while visiting relatives Money, Mississippi. Days later, the clerk's husband as well as his relative kidnaps Till in the middle of the night, brutally murdering him and throwing his body into the Tallahatchie River with a heavy cotton gin face tied around his neck. "Till's death symbolized for many African Americans the inherent racism and disparity of justice they continued to face in the aftermath of World War II.

    The lynching of William Brown, otherwise known as the Omaha Courthouse Lynching, remains a demonstrations of the Red Summer violence. Brown, a 40 year old African American man was accused of raping a 19 year old white woman. When police arrived at his residence to detain him, a mob of 250 white men and women arrived trying to apprehend him themselves, but failed in the process. While Omaha's mayor tried to deter the white community from rioting, the mob ultimately stormed the courthouse. Soon after, the mob proceeded to rip off Brown's clothing, hang him to a lamppost, and began to brutally shoot his dead body multiple times. Brown's lifeless body was then tied to the back of a police car dragged to a downtown intersection, and sadly burned in front of a crowd. 

    After all of this, rioters and the white community continued to take photos with Brown's body in celebration of his lynching. Souvenirs, including pieces of the rope used to hang him, were later sold to the public. The Omaha Courthouse lynching counties to be a part of history that represents the wave of racial and labor violence that swept the U.S during the Red Summer of 1919.