The streets of Birmingham, Alabama, on May 9, 1963 after violent demonstrations for civil rights. | Photo: AFP
About 4,000 black people were lynched in the southern states of the United States between 1877 and 1950, equivalent to more than one per week, according to a new report published Tuesday by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).
Over 6 million black people also fled the South between 1910-1970 to escape the violence and terror in a region known for its extreme and widespread racism.
This is the most extensive study published on “racial terrorism” recently, after five years of investigation in 12 southern states. It has added 700 more cases of lynchings to the previous investigation by sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck in 1995.
Commenting on the new study, said, “If you’re trying to make a point that the amount of racial violence is underestimated, well then, there’s no doubt about it,” Professor E.M. Beck of the University of Georgia told the New York Times. “What people don’t realize here is just how many there were, and how close. Places they drive by every day.”
Beck backed the argument of EJI founder Bryan Stevenson that lynchings did not merely consist in administering “justice,” but rather terrorizing the black community. His own study showed that lynching numbers did not rise or fall in proportion to the number of executions ordered by the state.
“Many of these lynchings were not executing people for crimes but executing people for violating the racial hierarchy,” explained Stevenson, referring to percieved offenses like bumping up against a white woman, refusing to move from the sidewalk, or wearing an army uniform. People would often refuse to grant a black person a trial in order to lynch them themselves and send a message to the others, he added
No one has been put on trail for the lynching of a black person, the report noted, also showing pictures of street vendors selling food to people watching the lynchings. Parts of the bodies were also distributed as souvenirs.
The extensive investigation by the EJI aims to recall the lynchings with memorials on the lynching sites, but expects to face obstacles.
Another part of black history was discussed on Monday on U.S. site Raw Story, about the FBI spying on “notorious” black writers for decades. Declassified documents from the intelligence agency and studied by academic William Maxwell (Washington University, Saint Louis) showed that 51 writers were put under surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI under his leadership read, monitored, and censored the writers.
“Hoover… saw as an emerging alliance between black literacy and black radicalism,” Maxwell explained to the Guardian.
The study also showed “the extent to which the FBI influenced African American writing,” Maxwell added.