Short Paper
VIEWPOINT: Legal lynching in America is a method that the whites introduced to intimidate Blacks and maintain white supremacy.
EVIDENCE:
• According to the Tuskegee Institute, about 4,742 lynching took place between 1882 and1968. Ninety percent of the victims were Southerners, 73 percent of the victims were blacks, and 27 percent were whites.
• During the same period, there was entrenched and ubiquitous fear and hatred of the Negro, which necessitated white mobs to turn to lynch law as a means of social control.
• Lynching, which refers to non-lethal public murder of individuals suspected of conceived crime and carried out by a mob, was an American invention.
• Lynching became associated with violence against blacks in the early nineteenth century. It was originally used as a form of punishment to slaves who tried to escape from their owners. Even whites who openly opposed slavery became victims of lunching.
• A partial list of ‘crimes’ that prompted lynching during these years amounts to total disregard for human life, including quarrelling, gambling, attempting to vote, arguing with a white man, demanding respect, unruly remarks, and “acting suspiciously.”
• Despite being carried out against offenders of serious crimes, lynchings were carried out without allowing a fair trial.
• The execution of Troy Davis saw many people use the term “legal lynching” in describing that heinous act. This term is used by people to express the injustice done when a person who may not be guilty is executed by the state.
• Apart from wrongful convictions, there exist similarities between historical lynching and the contemporary death penalty.
• A study conducted by Yale University School of Law in 2007 on death sentences in Connecticut showed that African-Americans defendants receive death penalty at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims are white. Additionally, killers of whites receive severe treatment than those who kill blacks regarding the charges to bring.
• Research has revealed that death sentences were higher in states with history of lynching.
EVALUATE:
In the field of American Studies, legal lynching is very important to discuss because historical lynching shares many similarities with the contemporary death penalty. Studies indicate that there is a strong relationship between race and the death penalty. After conducting an intensive analysis of my bibliography, it is evident that legal lynching is an issue that requires redress. During the early 1920s, people started to condemn the brutality of lynching and some people started to look for alternatives to lynching. This led to removal of lynching from the emotional atmosphere of local communities to prisons. On February 8, 1924, five black murders from rural Texas were electrocuted. This saw the beginning of modern era of execution in Texas. Many people have been executed since then, with majority of them Hispanic or black.
Evidence from literature shows that there is high level of racism in the American legal system with majority of African-Americans being executed by an all-white jury. We need to accept the relationship between our current criminal justice system and the 1920s lynch mobs. It has come the time to recognize, as most of the countries around the world have recognized, that there is no fairness in implementation of death sentence. This is the right time to follow the footsteps of abolitionists such as Fredrick Douglas and abolish the deliberate, unjust application of legalized lynching in our criminal system.
Since this class focuses on African American history since 1877, it is imperative to recognize how legal lynching have influenced American criminal system and deterring crime in the United States. An example is the case of “Scottsboro Boys” where innocent Black teenagers were falsely accused, convicted and imprisoned for raping a white woman, without any physical evidence to prove their guilt. Another example is the case of the Central Park 5 who served between seven to thirteen years behind bars for the 1989 crime. They were acquitted of their charges in 2002, the actual offender confessed, and his DNA matched that of the attacker. However, their civil rights lawsuit is still pending at the federal court.
Despite all these, nothing has been learnt from the past as the structure of inequality remains persistent. “Scottsboro Boys” was evidently a horrific case of injustice, one that many Americans assumed would never happen again. However, the history of the United States still replete with similar occurrences. Both the Central Park 5 and “Scottsboro Boys” stories remain as powerful reminders of what can transpire when there is manipulation of justice system, disregard of truth, and prevalence of racism. It is evident that legal lynching culminated into the modern day death sentence. It is a fact that death sentence is on its way out and the Abolition Movement just hopes that it does not consume more victims with it before it is gone.
Works Cited:
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1988
Caughey, John W. Their Majesties the Mob. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1960.
Ginzburg, Ralph, ed., 1998. One Hundred Years of Lynchings. Baltimore: Black Classic Press.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Thirty Years of Lynching in the U.S. 1889–1918. New York: Arno Press. 1969.
