Equal Justice Initiative issues report on “Lynching in America – Confronting the legacy of racial terror” –pictures Nsfwv

Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, August 7, 1930

graphic of lynching

Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror documents Equal Justice Initiative’s multi-year investigation into lynching in twelve Southern states during the period between Reconstruction and World War II.

EJI is a legal assistance organization for indigent defendants, based in Montgomery, Alabama. EJI researchers documented 3959 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 700 more lynchings of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.

Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.

This was not “frontier justice” carried out by a few marginalized vigilantes or extremists. Instead, many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators (including elected officials and prominent citizens) for bumping into a white person, or wearing their military uniforms after World War I, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person. People who participated in lynchings were celebrated and acted with impunity. Not a single white person was convicted of murder for lynching a black person in America during this period.  more