Lynching in the United States

The term lynching came into use in the United States in 1790 when a Colonel Charles Lynch, a Virginia landowner, held illegal trials of local suspected lawbreakers who were white for the most part. He whipped the accused while they were tied to a tree. Lynch, acting as judge, jury and executioner, used lynching to maintain law and order before formal courts were established. The same was true in the Old West where horse thieves, actual or suspected and mostly white, were lynched, usually by hanging. These lynchings were done outside the legal system when no system existed. This was not true, however, in the lynching of African Americans because a f

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enth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. As Bailey observed, wholesale disenfranchisement of African Americans was achieved by intimidation, fraud, trickery and violence. ôAmong various underhanded schemes were the literacy tests, unfairly administered by whites to the advantage of illiterate whites. In the eyes of white southerners, the goal of White Supremacy fully justified dishonorable devices.ö In his book, Bailey included Tables of Statistics of the number of people lynched by race between 1992 and 1970. He concludes that lynching appears to have been an important source of social control, regardless of race; however, the number of African Americans lynched was much more than of whites. In 1892, the worst year of lynching, 161 African Americans and 69 whites were lynched. Lynching was sometimes carried out by individuals, but most often by organized groups and the most infamous of these was the Ku Klux Klan which was founded in 1866 in Tennessee. These organizations grew as a reaction to the increasing ôleniencyö afforded African Americans in the Reconstruction period. The Klan, known as the ôinvisible empire,ö routinely flogged, mutilated and murdered African Americans in order to keep white control of
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Approximate Word count = 2337
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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