Frenzied White supremacist lynch mobs of the Deep South are an unfortunate reality which exists even to this day although they may not be as easily visible as they were a couple of decades ago. The embers of the lynch mob bestiality are still burning although the flames are dimmer than they used to be but they are still some way from being completely stubbed out. Going back a hundred and fifty years when the slave-running Confederacy had been defeated, the newly-freed Black Southerner found himself slipping into another dark hole of uncertainty with vindictive and vengeful Whites, that were till recently his master and tormentor, unable to accept him as an equal even on basic human attributes.
Almost as if by design, the White majority literally swooped down on the Blacks like birds of prey at the slightest pretext and many times, even without any pretext, which anyway, never merited even an admonishment that is given to little children. For the Black man, it was a hostile wilderness where bands of bloodthirsty White hooligans lurked at every corner, waiting to pounce on him and lynch him. They would usually lynch him on a fabricated pretext but many a time they didn’t need even that; just the fact that he was Black, was good enough (Gibson, Robert. A). For the Black individual, the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction was as much a living hell as the pre-Civil war years of bondage, if not worse. At least as a slave, he had some value and there was an attempt to sustain that value, howsoever meager.
The other intriguing aspect of the reactionary approach of the southern Whites toward people of color was that the minority White elite no longer played a major role in antagonizing the Black people. Defeat in the Civil War resulted in large scale loss of wealth among the land-owning White elites in the south. It was the ordinary and underprivileged White folks that began to perceive the freed Blacks as a direct competition for jobs and petty businesses. This mass of Whites gradually gained control of the streets as the federal forces withdrew by the 1870s. Suddenly the Blacks were all on their own against a vitriolic White majority that didn’t want them around if they couldn’t own them as slaves.
This White majority was in no mood to uphold the rule of law as envisaged by Congress, legislating slavery as unlawful and former slaves as equal citizens enjoying equal rights. By all accounts, this bunch of vengeful Whites took the law into their own hands as the federal forces left for good. As they took over the streets, highways and marketplaces, it became increasingly difficult for the Black folks to even move around freely let alone feel the freedom that the US constitution gave them. There was a lurking sense of terror that engulfed the hearts and minds of the newly freed slaves as they struggled to deal with the new situation.
How Ida B. Wells saw the truth behind lynching
Ida B. Wells was a straightforward and straight-talking Black woman who was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862. She was a pioneering female writer and an investigative journalist who can be rightly credited with bringing out to the public, the horrible saga of indiscriminate lynching of minority Blacks by the majority Whites in the Deep South. For a woman, that too, a Black woman, to have successfully broken through what is today called the ‘glass ceiling’ at a time when women, Black or White, did not even have the right to franchise in the United States, Wells had etched her name in golden letters in the history of this period.
As a local of the Deep South, Ida Wells had a better insight into the southern White male psyche. In many ways she identified this group as the cause of all race problems in the South and rightly asserted that this group stood to lose all the privileges they enjoyed if the Blacks began to compete with them for opportunities. The vast majority of the White males of the South were paranoid about the likely consequences of intermingling of races, especially White women cohabiting with Black men. This last possibility would almost drive the southern White man into a blinding rage that triggered the worst form of beastly behavior whenever a White mob descended on one or a few Black men identified as the scapegoat or the sacrificial lamb for lynching.
Before she identified the real reason behind this White penchant for lynching hapless Blacks, Wells was content to stereotype incidents of lynching to prevention of horrific crimes like rape even though she dreaded the very idea of lynching. However, one incident involving the brutal lynching of three Black men, who were close friends she knew to be eminent citizens of the Black community in Memphis, pushed her into investigating the matter during the course of which, her entire perception of the lynching of Blacks by Whites turned around on its head. She realized that lynching was a carefully thought out strategy to terrorize the Blacks from harboring any thoughts of progressing socio-economically or try to acquire a more refined profile. Her friends were lynched not because they ‘raped’ any White woman, but because they were successfully running their business (Wells-Barnett, Ida. B.).
It was a crude and barbarous strategy and could only be defined as terrorism. The White majority of the Deep South was not prepared to allow the Blacks to progress economically because economic empowerment would result in speedier social parity which the White male dreaded. Defeat in the Civil War had effectively shut the door on persecution of Blacks with legal sanction and although the several attempts were made through the shady Jim Crow legislations to return the Blacks to their pre-Civil War status, there was no question of fundamentally altering the constitution of the United States to accommodate the wishes of such jaundiced minds. It was the last major gasp of the monster before it went down.
Ida Wells found through her research into the overdriven zeal of the lynchpins that they carefully introduced the pretext of ‘rape’ of White women by Black men to gain acceptability for this heinous crime among the White population at large. Apparently, there must have been a sizable number of Whites, mainly women that did not approve of the beastliness that went with the lynching although they were far from accepting Blacks as equals. It was just a case of individual incapacity to stomach the horrifying beastliness of the lynch mobs. A Black man just had to look at a White woman a few seconds longer than the eyes take to blink, to be branded a ‘molester’ and if conditions permitted, a ‘rapist.’
A 1915 silent film that fanned White penchant for lynching Blacks
Among the many reasons that can be traced to how this perception of a free Black man as a perfidious and lustful sex maniac got embedded in the southern White imagination was the film “The Birth of a Nation” directed by D.W. Griffith, a talented southern White film-maker who couldn’t rise above the racial fault-lines of his upbringing. If the film was a hit among Griffith’s fellow southern Whites it was equally condemned by all others, all over, for projecting the disgraceful, amoral and immoral excuses to extoll the horrific excesses of southern White supremacist racism (Ebert, Roger). It fanned the vitriolic passions of the racist southern Whites and could largely be held responsible for the subsequent lynching outrages that kept occurring right up to the latter years of the twentieth century.
The film is in many ways, a tribute to the terrorist White vigilante grouping, Ku Klux Klan, infamous for the horrific lynching of Black victims whose agonizing screams of unspeakable pain from brutal torture can depress any civilized human within earshot. Films do leave a lasting impression on many and it was particularly true of the southern White audience in 1915 when “The Birth of a Nation” was released. It affected the thinking of entire generations of White southerners, many of whom stubbornly refuse to accept people of color as equal humans even to this day, and would gladly resort to the worst form of barbarism to drive his point.
1. Wells-Barnett, Ida. B. 2005. “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” 08 February 2005. Archive.org. Web. 16 April. 2015. <http://archive.org/stream/southernhorrors14975gut/14975.txt>
2. Ebert, Roger 2003. “Review: The Birth of a Nation.” 30 Mar. 2003. RogerEbert.com. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-birth-of-a-nation-1915>
Almost as if by design, the White majority literally swooped down on the Blacks like birds of prey at the slightest pretext and many times, even without any pretext, which anyway, never merited even an admonishment that is given to little children. For the Black man, it was a hostile wilderness where bands of bloodthirsty White hooligans lurked at every corner, waiting to pounce on him and lynch him. They would usually lynch him on a fabricated pretext but many a time they didn’t need even that; just the fact that he was Black, was good enough (Gibson, Robert. A). For the Black individual, the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction was as much a living hell as the pre-Civil war years of bondage, if not worse. At least as a slave, he had some value and there was an attempt to sustain that value, howsoever meager.
The other intriguing aspect of the reactionary approach of the southern Whites toward people of color was that the minority White elite no longer played a major role in antagonizing the Black people. Defeat in the Civil War resulted in large scale loss of wealth among the land-owning White elites in the south. It was the ordinary and underprivileged White folks that began to perceive the freed Blacks as a direct competition for jobs and petty businesses. This mass of Whites gradually gained control of the streets as the federal forces withdrew by the 1870s. Suddenly the Blacks were all on their own against a vitriolic White majority that didn’t want them around if they couldn’t own them as slaves.
This White majority was in no mood to uphold the rule of law as envisaged by Congress, legislating slavery as unlawful and former slaves as equal citizens enjoying equal rights. By all accounts, this bunch of vengeful Whites took the law into their own hands as the federal forces left for good. As they took over the streets, highways and marketplaces, it became increasingly difficult for the Black folks to even move around freely let alone feel the freedom that the US constitution gave them. There was a lurking sense of terror that engulfed the hearts and minds of the newly freed slaves as they struggled to deal with the new situation.
How Ida B. Wells saw the truth behind lynching
Ida B. Wells was a straightforward and straight-talking Black woman who was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862. She was a pioneering female writer and an investigative journalist who can be rightly credited with bringing out to the public, the horrible saga of indiscriminate lynching of minority Blacks by the majority Whites in the Deep South. For a woman, that too, a Black woman, to have successfully broken through what is today called the ‘glass ceiling’ at a time when women, Black or White, did not even have the right to franchise in the United States, Wells had etched her name in golden letters in the history of this period.
As a local of the Deep South, Ida Wells had a better insight into the southern White male psyche. In many ways she identified this group as the cause of all race problems in the South and rightly asserted that this group stood to lose all the privileges they enjoyed if the Blacks began to compete with them for opportunities. The vast majority of the White males of the South were paranoid about the likely consequences of intermingling of races, especially White women cohabiting with Black men. This last possibility would almost drive the southern White man into a blinding rage that triggered the worst form of beastly behavior whenever a White mob descended on one or a few Black men identified as the scapegoat or the sacrificial lamb for lynching.
Before she identified the real reason behind this White penchant for lynching hapless Blacks, Wells was content to stereotype incidents of lynching to prevention of horrific crimes like rape even though she dreaded the very idea of lynching. However, one incident involving the brutal lynching of three Black men, who were close friends she knew to be eminent citizens of the Black community in Memphis, pushed her into investigating the matter during the course of which, her entire perception of the lynching of Blacks by Whites turned around on its head. She realized that lynching was a carefully thought out strategy to terrorize the Blacks from harboring any thoughts of progressing socio-economically or try to acquire a more refined profile. Her friends were lynched not because they ‘raped’ any White woman, but because they were successfully running their business (Wells-Barnett, Ida. B.).
It was a crude and barbarous strategy and could only be defined as terrorism. The White majority of the Deep South was not prepared to allow the Blacks to progress economically because economic empowerment would result in speedier social parity which the White male dreaded. Defeat in the Civil War had effectively shut the door on persecution of Blacks with legal sanction and although the several attempts were made through the shady Jim Crow legislations to return the Blacks to their pre-Civil War status, there was no question of fundamentally altering the constitution of the United States to accommodate the wishes of such jaundiced minds. It was the last major gasp of the monster before it went down.
Ida Wells found through her research into the overdriven zeal of the lynchpins that they carefully introduced the pretext of ‘rape’ of White women by Black men to gain acceptability for this heinous crime among the White population at large. Apparently, there must have been a sizable number of Whites, mainly women that did not approve of the beastliness that went with the lynching although they were far from accepting Blacks as equals. It was just a case of individual incapacity to stomach the horrifying beastliness of the lynch mobs. A Black man just had to look at a White woman a few seconds longer than the eyes take to blink, to be branded a ‘molester’ and if conditions permitted, a ‘rapist.’
A 1915 silent film that fanned White penchant for lynching Blacks
Among the many reasons that can be traced to how this perception of a free Black man as a perfidious and lustful sex maniac got embedded in the southern White imagination was the film “The Birth of a Nation” directed by D.W. Griffith, a talented southern White film-maker who couldn’t rise above the racial fault-lines of his upbringing. If the film was a hit among Griffith’s fellow southern Whites it was equally condemned by all others, all over, for projecting the disgraceful, amoral and immoral excuses to extoll the horrific excesses of southern White supremacist racism (Ebert, Roger). It fanned the vitriolic passions of the racist southern Whites and could largely be held responsible for the subsequent lynching outrages that kept occurring right up to the latter years of the twentieth century.
The film is in many ways, a tribute to the terrorist White vigilante grouping, Ku Klux Klan, infamous for the horrific lynching of Black victims whose agonizing screams of unspeakable pain from brutal torture can depress any civilized human within earshot. Films do leave a lasting impression on many and it was particularly true of the southern White audience in 1915 when “The Birth of a Nation” was released. It affected the thinking of entire generations of White southerners, many of whom stubbornly refuse to accept people of color as equal humans even to this day, and would gladly resort to the worst form of barbarism to drive his point.
Works Cited
1. Wells-Barnett, Ida. B. 2005. “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” 08 February 2005. Archive.org. Web. 16 April. 2015. <http://archive.org/stream/southernhorrors14975gut/14975.txt>
2. Ebert, Roger 2003. “Review: The Birth of a Nation.” 30 Mar. 2003. RogerEbert.com. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-birth-of-a-nation-1915>
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