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NAACP - The Struggle Continues
The Negro
Holocaust - Lynching and Race in America - Part 1
By Lunette Howell and Betty Valentine, Toledo NAACP
Editorial Team
Guest Column
Over the next few months we will focus on the history of
lynchings of African Americans in the United States. This
article is part one of a three-part series. We continue to
see on the news that racism is very much alive!! Our
community also continues to share experiences of racial
incidents in their place of work, in our schools,
restaurants, hospitals, and other public and private
sectors.
These aren’t lynchings but whatever expression of hate a
person can generate to another they will. Situations can be
elevated for no apparent reason and even if we know and
express our rights, we still are victims of intimidation or
“non-physical lynchings.”
President Trump has made it easy for people to express how
they feel about African Americans and other people of
color. A recent incident occurred where a grandmother was
pulled over, handcuffed, and taken to jail for driving over
the line on the highway.
There have been several incidents where police in different
cities kicked and punched black men in the head while they
were already secured in handcuffs. Two young black men
could not sit in a restaurant to wait for others in their
party to arrive without having police show up to handcuff
them and take them off to jail because of a frightened white
female manager.
Police showed up at Yale University because a white female
called them to report a black female student sleeping in the
common space on campus. The list is long and as bad as it
is today, our ancestors suffered horrific beatings and
lynching for years!! Follow us through the history.
On Thursday, April 26,
2018, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in
Montgomery, Alabama, to remember the thousands of Americans
who were hanged, burned or otherwise murdered by white
mobs.
From 1882 to 1968, 4,743
lynchings occurred in the United States. Of the known
people who were lynched 3,446 were black. Black lynchings
accounted for 72.7 percent of the lynchings recorded. It is
unlikely we will ever know just how many lynchings happened
throughout the history of the United States, as many likely
went unreported or were not classified as lynchings in
documentation at the time. Of the 1,297 (27.3 percent) of
white people lynched many were lynched for helping blacks,
being anti-lynching or for domestic crimes. The states with
the highest number of lynchings from 1882 to 1968 were
Mississippi with 581, Georgia with 531, and Texas with 493.
Seventy-nine percent of lynchings happened in the South. Of
the lynchings that took place in the West, most were of
murderers or cattle thieves.
Lynchings profoundly
impacted race relations in this country and shaped the
geographic, political, social and economic conditions of
blacks in ways that are still evident today. Lynching
created a fearful environment where racial subordination and
segregation was maintained with limited resistance for
decades.
In his 1867 annual message
to Congress, President Andrew Johnson declared that black
Americans had “less capacity for government than any other
race of people,” that they would “relapse into barbarism” if
left to their own devices, and that giving them the vote
would result in “a tyranny such as this continent has never
yet witnessed.”
Thus, the lynching of
black people in the Southern and border states became an
institutionalized method used by whites to terrorize blacks
and maintain white supremacy. It was an authorized means
of social control.
The Origins of the NAACP
In mid-August 1908, the
white population of Springfield, Illinois, quickly reacted
to reports that a white woman had been assaulted in her home
by a black man. Soon afterwards another instance of an
assault by a black man on a white woman was reported. These
incidents, coming within hours of each other, inflamed a
gathering mob.
Springfield Police took
into custody a black vagrant, Joe James, for one of the
assaults. Another man, George Richardson, a local factory
worker was arrested for the second assault. A mob which had
been forming since the news of the assaults was first
announced now quickly assembled at the Sangamon County
Courthouse to lynch the two men in custody.
Unable to get the accused
men whom the Sheriff announced had been moved to an
undisclosed location, the mob turned its wrath toward two
other black men, Scott Burton and William Donegan, who were
in the area. They were quickly lynched.
The mob then turned its
fury on the homes of black families in Springfield. After
rampaging through the city, they extended their violence
into small communities outside the city limits. The mob
targeted stores which had guns and ammunition. Mob leaders
carefully directed the participants to destroy only homes
and businesses either owned by blacks or which served black
patrons, thus leaving nearby white homes and businesses
untouched.
Some Springfield blacks
fought back in self-defense. Burton used his shotgun in an
attempt to save his life and home. He was the first
victim. Donegan, an 84-year-old cobbler, whose reputation
had been tainted in the eyes of the mob by the fact that he
had been married to a white woman for over 30 years, was the
second victim.
When the carnage finally
ended, six black people were shot and killed, two were
lynched and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
property destroyed. About 2,000 black people were driven
out of the city of Springfield as a result of the riot.
About 150 suspected mob
participants were arrested. Threats from other mob
participants restrained people from testifying against those
suspected of the violence. Later it was revealed that
Richardson, who was initially charged with assault, had been
wrongly identified and the indictment was dismissed.
The Springfield Riot made
the capital of Illinois and the home of Abraham Lincoln the
center of national attention, especially since this was the
first race riot in the North in over a century. The most
lasting consequence of the riot was its impetus in getting
white reformers such as Jane Addams and black civil rights
activists such as W.E.B. DuBois to create the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
one year later following an interracial conference in
upstate New York. It is the continuing mission of the NAACP
to ensure the political, educational, social, economic
equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate
race-based discrimination.
Become a NAACP member - $30/adult; $15/youth annually and
receive a Crisis magazine. Join our meetings every secondnd
Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. The June meeting will be at the Mott
Branch Library at 1085 Dorr Street.
View our website at
www.naacptoledo.org.
Call us at 419-214-1551.
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