Lynchings During and After Reconstruction: Brutalities to be Remembered

In an attempt to situate a little further the materials that I posted about monuments, lynching, and land loss, here is a quote from an article I wrote in 2018 about what lynchings were all about. 

"In the decades following the Civil War, an era of violence erupted, not unlike that of the infamous “patrollers” in slavery days in which black mobility and freedom attempts were met with violence. In particular, lynching was used to instill terror in the black population. Two sites contain the most thorough information on the history of lynching in America. The initial work of Monroe Work (n.d.) for the decades following Reconstruction lists the names of 4,800 plus and the work of the Environment Justice Initiative (n.d.) between the years 1877 and 1950 provides chilling information about the 4,400 plus African Americans who were lynched. According to Hahn (2003: 425–427), these mob executions or lynchings were symptomatic of the tensions between whites and blacks, as the former used this form of violence in an attempt to maintain power, as blacks exerted their rights. Hale (1998: 203, 204) emphasized lynchings as public spectacle as “structure, a sequence and pace of events” that went from allegations to mob violence following scene preparation, mutilation and/or hanging, and souvenir collecting, among other variables. Tolnay, Deane, and Beck (1996: 811) explored lynching from a spatial perspective—how lynching in one community impacted the same in another community. Their “deterrence model” of lynching is supported by evidence that whites ceased lynching activities when they were satisfied that the results would cause blacks to be “even more circumspect in their interactions so as not to provoke violent responses.” Young (2005: 641) focused research not upon numbers, nor spectacle, but upon the black body as souvenir." --- page 908. 

The complete article can be found at Hinson, W. R. (2018). Land Gains, Land Losses: The Odyssey of African Americans Since Reconstruction. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 77, 893-939. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajes.12233