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Updated: June 13, 2025
In the years immediately preceding the war, racially motivated lynchings and riots, which had been largely confined to the South, began to spread into the North and Midwest. In Statesboro, Georgia, two blacks, who had been accused and convicted of murder, were seized from the courtroom by an angry mob.
After the Civil War, however, horrible lynchings became frequent; and within the last decade we have seen a Negro boy stabbed in numberless places while on his way to the stake, we have seen the eyes of a Negro man burned out with hot irons and pieces of his flesh cut off, and a Negro woman whose only offense was a word of protest against the lynching of her husband while in the state of advanced pregnancy hanged head downwards, her clothing burned from her body, and herself so disemboweled that her unborn babe fell to the ground.
It's all foolishness and haste and violence and cruel folly, stupidity and blundering hate and selfish ambition all the things that men have done all the things they will ever do. Gott! Smallways, what a muddle and confusion life has always been the battles and massacres and disasters, the hates and harsh acts, the murders and sweatings, the lynchings and cheatings.
These executions had under the circumstances a clear moral justification. Unfortunately it had the effect of familiarizing the people with the irregular execution of Negroes, and so paved the way for those "lynchings" for which, since the proper authorities are obviously able and willing to deal adequately with such crimes, no such defence can be set up.
A letter of protest brought in due course, but much more slowly, one hundred and seven clippings, which yielded the following reasons why men killed: There were four suicides, three lynchings, one infanticide, three murders while resisting arrest, three criminals killed while resisting arrest, two men killed in riots, eight murders in the course of committing burglaries and robberies, seven persons killed in vendettas, three grace murders, and twenty-four killed in quarrels over petty causes; there were twelve murders from jealousy, followed in four instances by suicide on the part of the murderer; six killings justifiable on the "higher law" theory only, but involving great provocation, and thirty deliberate slaughters.
But they did their duty so valiantly and so uncompromisingly that they added to their already great prestige and showed the world a new record in keeping potentially dangerous frontier camps almost entirely free from crime. There was hardly any gun play. There were only two or three homicides, and there were no failures in justice and no lynchings.
This latter is the explanation given for the numerous lynchings in America and also for the practices of "popular justice" that used to be a common feature of frontier life. In the absence of a properly constituted legal machinery groups of men undertake to shoot, hang, or burn those whom they consider dangerous to the public weal.
In other words, the sins of the fathers are being visited upon their children to the third and fourth generation. That is a vast improvement over the original statement published by Coon-Captain Otis to the effect that Southern white women seek black paramours, and that most lynchings are caused by the guilty parties getting caught.
On the other hand, in one case two young women were included among the victims; another was really a series of lynchings emphasizing the lot of some Negroes under a vicious economic system; and the last simply grew out of the jealousy and hatred aroused by a Negro of independent means who knew how to stand up for his rights.
Though mob fury has broken out on occasion in every Southern State, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina are measurably free from such visitations. Over considerable periods of time, Georgia comes unenviably first, followed by Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana. These four States have furnished a large majority of the lynchings.
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