Lynching: The Forgotten Victims
Day 4 of black history month we discuss lynching.
Lynching was the ultimate form of control over the black population. Lynching was not random or impulsive, it was a well-organized and well-publicized event. Advertisements and notices were placed in newspapers. People put on their best clothes to attend a lynching. Clergy, judges, police, business owners, would all come to watch a black person get lynched. Railroad companies would run special promotions to the destination of a lynching. The truth of the matter is this: lynching was sanctioned by the community.
Most people know of the lynching of Emmett Till the 14-year-old black boy who was falsely accused of offending a white woman in Mississippi. His casket lays in state at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. However, many do not know about the lynching of Jesse Thornton, who was lynched in 1940 in the town of Luverne, Alabama for referring to a white police officer by his name, without calling him mister.
William Little, had bravely served our country in WW1 and he was lynched in 1919 for refusing to take off his Army uniform. He had survived the horrors of this brutal war, only to return to Blakely, Georgia and be murdered.
Jeff Brown was running to catch a train when he bumped into a white girl. For that offense he was lynched.
In 1920 the John Robinson Circus came to Duluth, Minnesota. Two white teenagers Irene Tusken and Jimmie Sullivan had went to the circus. Jimmie came home and told his father that he had been attacked by five or six black men and that Irene had been raped. A medical examination of her found no evidence of rape, nonetheless six black circus workers were arrested. News of this alleged assault and rape spread through the area. A crowd of 10,000 white people showed up and demanded three of the black men: Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie. William F. Murnian, the Dulth Commissioner of Public Safety ordered the police not to use their firearms to protect the accused black men from the lynch mob. The mob entered the jail and removed the three men. They held a trial and found the three guilty of rape. They paraded them through Duluth until they reached their destination and started beating them and then hanged them.
In 1899, 2000 white people watched as Sam Hose was burned alive after being tortured. His hands were chopped off and displayed in the front window of a grocery store
Jesee Washington was tortured for hours in front of a crowd of over 15,000 white people, before he was burned alive, in Waco, Texas.
In 1919 John Hartfield was lynched in Ellisville, MS for allegedly having a white girlfriend. Over 10,000 white people watched him get hung. And a couple days later another black man was lynched because he mentioned Hartfield’s murder.
Lynching, was a tool that fueled the Great Migration. In the South, the prison population was not disproportionality black like it was in the North. Jim Crow plus lynching was all that was needed to control the black population.
Since 1900, only 1% of all of the perpetrators of lynching have been held to account for their murderous ways. Over 4,000 black people have been lynched in the United States. It is believed that Arizona, is the only state west of the Mississippi where a black person has not been lynched.
