BLACK HISTORY MONTH
The roots and legacy of U.S. lynchings
"It is well known that the black race is the most
oppressed and most exploited of the human family ... that the
spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had as
an immediate result the rebirth of slavery which was, for
centuries, a scourge for the Negroes and a bitter disgrace for
mankind. What everyone does not perhaps know is that after 65
years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes still endure
atrocious moral and material sufferings, of which the most
cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching."
Excerpted from Ho Chi Minh's International
Correspondence, No. 59, written in 1924
Ho Chi Minh, the anti-imperialist communist
leader of the Vietnamese people, made this statement at the
height of lynchings in the United States, mainly in the South.
He spent a number of years living in the United States, which
helped elevate his understanding of racist and class injustice,
before returning to his beloved homeland. His observations were
very illuminating, considering how cruelly the Vietnamese and
other Indochinese peoples were treated by French colonialism
and U.S. militarism before their decades-long liberation
struggle triumphed.
Has there been any real qualitative social change for
African Americans in the United States since Ho Chi Minh's
words were published 80 years ago? Has the legacy of horrific
lynchings been tossed into the dustbin of history or is it
still alive and well today?
With the rise of class society thousands of years ago,
vigilante-sponsored violence along with state-orchestrated
violence became commonplace. In the United States, people of
color, labor organizers, Jewish immigrants, political radicals
and others have certainly felt the wrath of lynchings by those
who profess a white- supremacist mentality. Today for African
Americans, lynchings remain a grim, painful reminder of almost
three centuries of being treated as second- and third-class
citizens.
Lynchings and slavery
Some historians trace "lynch law" to Col. Charles Lynch,
who, during the war of independence by the 13 colonies, was
based in Virginia to deal with British colonialists. Slavery
was nothing more than institutionalized lynching, since African
peoples were treated as less than human or as property.
Historian John F. Callahan writes: "During slavery there
were numerous public punishments of slaves, none of which were
preceded by trials or any other semblance of civil or judicial
processes. Justice depended solely upon the slaveholder.
Executions, whippings, brandings, and other forms of severe
punishment, including sometimes the public separation of
families, were meted out by authority or at the command of the
master or his representative. Often, slaves from the plantation
and, sometimes, nearby plantations were assembled and made to
witness the punishment as an example of the master's absolute
authority to wield the power of life and death over each and
every slave." ("The Oxford Companion to African American
Literature," 1997)
After the Civil War, freed slaves fought for complete
liberation during the Recon struction period. But lynchings
increased dramatically when former Con federate officers and
vengeful South ern planters regrouped to form the Ku Klux Klan,
White Citizens Councils and other extra-legal groups to
literally terrorize Black people back into semi-slavery
conditions.
With the Compromise of 1877, the federal government pulled
out its troops and left the freed slaves at the mercy of these
white-supremacist terrorists. As representatives of the
interests of the ascendant Northern capitalist class, the
government wanted to put a brake on fulfilling the same
political and economic rights for Black workers in the South as
those generally granted to Northern white male workers, thus
keeping wages down by dividing workers along racial lines.
"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 20th
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)."
(Robert L. Zangrando, "The Reader's Companion to American
History," 1991)
As stated above, these statistics do not take into full
account the victims in the "race riots" that began in the late
1800s. These massacres of Black people increas ed at the end of
World War I when Black soldiers, who had been relegated to
segregated units overseas, returned home expecting to be
treated as full citizens.
There was also the infamous Tulsa "race riot" in 1921, when
white business owners instigated a massacre upon the prosperous
Black community.
No white person was ever convicted of killing a Black person
during these tragic episodes. This racist atmosphere was aided
by the "separate but equal" law passed by the U.S. Supreme
Court in 1896 that legalized racist Jim Crow laws in the South
and other sections of the United States.
Racist use of the rape charge
A recurring "excuse" for the lynchings of Black men has been
the alleged rape of white women. Under slavery, while both
African women and men were "owned" body and soul, the
systematic rape of Black women was viewed as the "property
right" of the white slavemaster. The recent revelation that the
late arch-racist Strom Thurmond "fathered" a daughter during
the 1920s with a Black servant reflects the persistence of
semi-slavery conditions.
Sexual relations between Black men and white women were
socially viewed as taboo from the days of slavery until 1967,
when miscegenation laws were struck down by the Supreme Court.
This important con cession won in the civil-rights strug gle
legalized the right of Black-white heterosexual couples to
marry in the South.
Just the rumor that a Black man had raped a white woman
would signal that a racist lynching would not be far behind.
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was tortured to death by racists
in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman in
Mississippi.
The judicial system began instituting legal lynchings.
Hundreds of Black men were executed after being charged with
raping white women. Who could ever forget the Scottsboro case
in the early 1930s, where nine young Black men were accused of
gang raping two white women in Alabama? The case gained
worldwide attention as the Communist Party and other
progressives came to the defense of these innocent Black
youths.
Even though the women finally admitted under oath that no
rape had occurred, most of the youths were forced to spend many
years in prison until public pressure forced the U.S.
government to pardon them.
There are currently two important cases that could be
considered modern-day Scottsboro cases. The case of Darryl Hunt
was publicized in a Jan. 5 column by Bob Herbert, an African
American opinion writer for the New York Times. Herbert
described how in 1984, Hunt, then 19 years old, was accused of
the rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, a 25-year-old white woman
in North Carolina. Forensic DNA testing had just been
developed. During the original trial it proved that Hunt was
innocent of the charge--but still he languished in jail for
almost 20 years.
Hunt's lawyers forced a public outcry, and finally
exposé articles in the Winston-Salem Journal forced the
courts to release Hunt this past December on a $250,000 bond
pending a hearing in February. His lawyers are hoping that all
murder charges will eventually be dropped by the prosecution.
Only time will tell.
The second case has received more national attention. Marcus
Dixon, 18, an academically gifted athlete, received a 10-year
prison sentence in Rome, Ga., after being found guilty of
statutory rape, a misdemeanor, and aggravated child
molestation, a felony. The judge sentenced him to 10 years in
prison on the felony charge.
Dixon testified that he had had consensual sex with a
classmate who was three months shy of her 16th birthday at the
time. He stated that she told him her father was a racist and
that she feared he would kill the two if he caught them
together. (New York Times, Jan. 22)
A jury found Dixon innocent of rape, sexual battery and
aggravated assault, all felonies. Five of the jurors publicly
stated that they would not have convicted Dixon on the other
charges had they known about the prospect of a long prison
sentence.
Civil-rights forces along with defense attorneys have
mounted a nationwide campaign of legal and political pressure
on the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn this outrageous
conviction and sentence.
'Fighting for social justice'
Earl Ofari Hutchinson has assembled figures to show that the
U.S. criminal justice system is still racist to the core:
"Accord ing to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund ... between 1930
and 1996, more than half of all those executed have been
African-Americans. When the crime (or accusation) is rape, the
death penalty has almost always been exclusively reserved for
blacks. Of the 453 men executed for rape since 1930, 405 have
been black. Nearly all of them were executed in the South. They
were arrested and convicted on the flimsiest evidence, usually
no more than the word of a white woman. At the same time, not
one white man received the death penalty for raping a black
woman. There is no official record in any Southern state of a
black man ever being executed for raping a black woman. The
victims of all but 44 of the blacks executed in the South from
1930 through 1984 were white. Not much has changed over the
years. A black is still 11 times more likely to get the death
penalty than a white when the victim is white. At present
nearly half of those currently sitting on the nation's death
rows are black." (Afrocentric News 2000)
In the latter part of the 19th century, anti-lynching
campaigns sprung up throughout the North and South, led for
almost 50 years by the National Associ ation of Colored Women
and the NAACP. Ida B. Wells, an African American tea cher,
journalist and suffragist, was a leading figure in this
struggle. To help debunk the racist theory that lynching was
justified to "protect the sanctity of white womanhood," the
Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching
encouraged white women to join this anti-racist campaign.
Today, institutionalized lynching persists in the police
killings of Black youths, like the recent shooting of unarmed
Timothy Stansbury in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant community.
The incarceration of Black political prisoners for decades in
the prison-industrial complex further illustrates how
super-exploitation under capitalism, which keeps so many
African Americans in poverty, continues to be maintained
through state terror.
The United States is the most powerful imperialist country
largely due to the national oppression of Black people and
other peoples of color. African American activists, in raising
the political demand for reparations and targeting U.S.
corporations and banks that profited off the sweat and blood of
unpaid African slaves, are recognizing this inherited, endemic
super-exploitation. The righteous demand for reparations, which
deserves the classwide solidarity of all working people, is a
small price to pay for all the centuries of immense suffering
and degradation that African Americans have had to endure and
fight back against.
Reprinted from the Feb. 5, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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