During the 1880's and the 1890's, the big three Ivies -- Yale, Harvard, and Princeton -- all had huge outdoor parties -- that ended with a Black man getting lynched. They weren't really riots, because other than the Black men who were hanged and any Black women who were raped, no property damage occurred. No White people were hurt or killed.No one was kicked out of school. No one was prosecuted. It was the socially acceptable way to end a large, outdoor party, just like Fourth of July barbecues ended in the South.
Nowadays, a public hanging of an innocent Black man in the late afternoon on or around the Fourth of July, with photos taken for postcards, and bodily extremities cut off for souvenirs, is socially unacceptable. We have fireworks instead.
14
as a non-believer I'm thinking an association between religion (us vs them) - slavery - how to rationalise human cruelty - and racism (anglos vs everyone else)
Michael Moore cartooned it in one of his movies - on arrival the puritans were knee-jerk terrified of 'Indians!' and 'Turkeys!' - later it became anyone else - then blacks - so by forming one tight group (come to my church) you tend to create the 'other' you can perceive as evil. Standard Machiavelli - unify your people by identifying a common enemy - so now it's a crime to be black in the USA.
Karma - I can imagine white owners of plantations like I visited beside the Mississippi - if few whites among many blacks - would feel a need to over-react with cruelty to make sure the majority of blacks didn't 'step out of place' - so whippings and beatings would serve to assuage the whites' guilt about imprisoning other human beings for their own personal profit.
Well those suppressed guilty feelings are coming out now in support of the ultimate white supremacist - DJT - with expected results down the track - southern folks, send your boys to be cannon fodder - you know God is On Your Side ... !
2
Read "Gone with the Wind" for a complete and unvarnished justification for lynching and the KKK, and the so-called reasoning of those evil, vicious murderers.
3
This may never happen my in my lifetime BUT I hope that one day this country apologizes to Native Americans and African Americans for the violent, brutal, and heinous treatment received at the hands of Whites.
10
Many white suffragists in the USA at this time supported the lynchings of black men by white mobs. At the very least, they regarded African Americans as inferior to whites. Most prominent suffragists in the USA were outraged that a black man, hitherto a slave, had the vote whilst they did not.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150404205455/http://the-toast.net/2014/04/...
8
It is likely that racism has been around since there were races. It is also likely that intolerance of others has been with us for as long as our species has been around as well. There were a lot of ugly, selfish, and ignorant responses to this post. We certainly have a long way to go until we can honestly call ourselves Homo Sapiens.
3
It might be enlightening to look at how the New York Times covered the biggest mass lynching of African-Americans in U.S. history. That occurred during the draft riots of 1863. New Yorkers lynched 11 people of color over a few days -- hanging, torturing and burning them as onlookers cheered. Some historical sources said the black population of the city fell 20 percent after the slaughter. It easier to look far afield on this sad chapter of U.S. history -- much harder to look in your own neighborhood.
16
See also the article in the New York Times of September 3, 1900, "Coney Island Negro Hunt." After a brutal assault on a young couple, two men were wanted for "a crime for which in sections of the United States hundreds of black men have at different times paid the penalty of their lives without process of law." (One can sense a note of regret that this option is not available in New York.) As a result, an order has gone out to arrest every black man on Coney Island, and hundreds of volunteers are taking part in the hunt. There is no suggestion that there is anything out of line about these mass arrests.
10
I think that lynching was based partly on a general hatred of black people, as witness the incredible barbarity of the treatment of many victims, but also on a real belief that black people are inherently given to violent, uncivilized behaviour. The proof of that assertion is the frequency with white people, including police officers, see menace -- murderous intent -- in innocent moves made by black men, such as reaching for a wallet, when an officer demands ID, or when a twelve-year-old boy has a toy gun in his waistband.
14
The ultimate irony of the Civil War is that all those who died pretty much died in vain. A war fought to end slavery begat 150 years of second class citizenship for those slaves and showed the world that Americans are racist to the core and no more civilized than a coiled snake.
Are we really that much different today?
17
Thank you for this op-ed piece. I do think it is important that Americans reveal unpleasant historical events and stop pretending these events did not occur. Germany has openly examined its past, America should do the same. My book club read "Red Summer" and "The Beast in Florida" last year and between those books and others we have read, there is indeed a truth that has not been told.
13
This brings to mind Trump and the Central Park Five.
19
histoirically, it is the concocted stories out of Southern and Western newspapers which have created the image and idea of the poor, angelic & defenseless woman, put upon by brutish, inhuman men-(previously, black men-now just men), and the idea and the explanation that all men are brutes, cannot or will not think and must be held in check, remains. It is from the reports and allegations against blacks, originally, that most of the metoo generation of women have taken their fear and horror of men. How this occurred is through lawyers mainly. Seeking ideas and ways to charge offenders, lawyers have dipped into the histories of alleged crimes against women in the SOuth because they have been common,easy to use, hard to defend and those women willing to make charges don't really care what happens to the men who are charged-often they never even see them or only after they have been severely beaten and abused in jails , making them hard to identify, and if they are killed or die in prisons, the women usually feel relieved.
Soon,the very concept of the rape accusation was forcibly "wed" to the idea of criminal lies-and cooked evidence-charges which were completely false in nature and used to destroy men-not to make women whole.
If todsay's metoo women want to know why the concept is given so much disrespect in US courts-let them read about the lynchings and concomitant rape accusations against black men and teens.
2
A seldom recognized fact is that black Americans who can trace back their lineage to the days of slavery, and even to colonial America, actually have deeper 'roots' in this country than the average American. Furthermore, their involuntary role in the building of our nation has been utterly unrecognized, and the brutality of their existence downplayed.
The difference is that from the beginning they were excluded from the 'fabric' of our nation, and even after emancipation, seen almost universally as inferior and as sources of shame and/or targets of hatred.
There is a word that defines the sanctioned or unprosecuted practice of one ethno-religious group killing members of another group. That word is genocide. Lynch mobs and the KKK were just para-military death squads by another name.
25
Thank you Mr. Seguin for this honest portrayal of our collective history. The normalization of terror was a constant after the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of Union troops in 1876. I read once that what Dr. King wrought was the end of terror in the South. That is an accurate assessment of just what the Civil Rights movement did to transform this country. That this transformation is far from complete is evidenced daily in social media, and all other forms of mass communications.
19
Read "The Underground Railroad," by Colson Whitehead. A great book about the nightmare of slavery. Winner of the "National Book Award."
9
1890 is just a few blinks ago in the eye of history. The American citizens who were guilty of these horrible crimes are the grandparents and great grandparents of Americans living (and voting) today. How many of their families continued to harbor and nurture the same hatreds in the privacy of their homes? Feelings kept hidden until the advent of the Trump administration. Anyone wondering what is wrong with our country merely has to look at our tragic and not-so-distant past.
31
Hence the case can be made for removing statues of Confederate
leaders. It's not so much that they wanted to preserve their states' right to engage in slavery but that the memory of such leaders helped create an envirommment were Blacks where treated as second class citizens.
13
Based on your argument, shouldn't these publications also be removed since they were EXPLICITLY creating "an environment where Blacks were treated as second class citizens?"
2
3446 blacks were killed by lynching over a roughly 50 year. Lynching was not confined to blacks, as more than 1500 whites were also lynched.
The more interesting question would be coverage of the slaughter of 6 million Jews in only 5 years. Why is the Times obsessed with only black tragedies?
4
When has there not been coverage of the Holocaust? There is extensive media coverage, museums, books, and the like emanating from both Europe and the US regarding the Holocaust. It has hardly been swept under the rug. The same cannot be said for lynchings of black Americans. I'm sorry you don't want to talk or read about these events but they are a part of American history and should be discussed along with all of the other aspects of our history.
39
This article makes it very clear that in post-Emancipation America, black citizens were never really safe. It's a very sad commentary about the racist facts that litter US history. Unfortunately, this is also the sad story that haunts minority groups the world over, as the oppressors and the conquerors repeatedly used horror to psychologically continue their conquest, if not slavery itself. It was demanding submission. If you look at photos take during the Armenian genocide, you will notice that the lynching of men, pregnant women and priests was a horrific, but common tool used by the Ottoman Turks as a way of defeating, both physically and psychologically, one of their most important and oldest minority groups.
9
I always thought Ida B Wells should have been chosen to grace the $20 Bill. Her story should be more widely told.
31
We have been facing the past, how could we forget it with 10 articles a day based on race from the New York Times!
We get it, we know our history, we know what happened we simply don't want to relive it every day. Besides, hardly anyone alive today was an actual slave so no one really knows what they're talking about....
1
Wow. Because slavery was abolished in 1865, that means no one knows what they are talking about when they talk about slavery and its racist legacy? Are you serious? That would mean that no one can discuss anything that happened before anyone alive today was born. What about all the narratives (oral and written) made by enslaved people? What about the physical evidence, the diaries and newspapers of the time? When the last survivor of the Holocaust dies, does that mean no one will know what happened in Germany in the 1930's? You seem to be suggesting that maybe slavery wasn't so bad after all. What a shameful thing to say.
Bringing up racism is not reliving the past because racism is not past. You hardly ever hear anyone talk about how important it is to let women vote because that battle was won years ago. When the battle against racism is won -- maybe two or three generations from now -- then you can complain about rehashing the past. Until then, you are simply denying the existence of a deep and grave problem that has existed since the founding of the country. Just because it doesn't affect you personally does not mean that it doesn't exist.
10
Yes, but we have grandparents and great grandparents who were lynched. Do you think only slaves were lynched?
What's your point?
Black people are still suffering the consequences of the past. Two black men were arrested for sitting in a Starbucks in 2018! Years ago, way back in the 50s, they would have been dragged out by a lynch mob to teach them a lesson and ensure they knew their place in society - the bottom.
7
It was really about White power and violence- Many Mexican-Americans were included as victims per NYT "When Americans Lynched Mexicans" By William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Feb. 20, 2015
"From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming." A lot of appologies need to be made.
9
"British press generally began to doubt American “civilization.”
Yea, I'm an American living in Europe at the moment and let's just say there are deep doubts today about American "civilization". Can't imagine why.
22
Anybody ever see the lynching post cards produced in the early 20th Century?
I won't try to post a link here.
It's easy enough to google it.
Prepare yourself.
11
Let me say at the outset, Washington, DC and Delaware are in the Upper South, not the North. An apology from the MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER or any other newspaper will atone for the lynching of Black people. What will an apology accomplish for the descendants of those who were lynched? NOTHING! This country must be made safe for Black and other marginalized people. Even in 2018, the black body is not safe from the police.
7
People who do not commit crimes and harm others are safe from the police.
So you believe Justine Damond committed a crime and harmed others?
3
We like to think of racism as strictly a southern problem. Granted the northern states didn't have slavery, and lynchings weren't as common, but northern states practiced segregation and kept their immigrant communities in check by housing them in slums. They used the law to keep out undesirable people of color especially black people instead of the violence seen in the south.
After the civil war we abandoned the former slaves to ongoing violence because reconstruction was too hard and too expensive. We let the southern states off the hook with a light slap on the wrist despite the fact that they were guilty of treason. We allowed them to rewrite the history of the civil war as an act of northern aggression and a disagreement about state rights instead of acknowledging that it was about maintaining slavery.
Even after the civil rights movement we avoided having a true accounting of our history of racism. Along came Nixon's silent majority and Reagan's dismissal of integration and all the gains made after the civil rights movement started to slip backwards. Now we have Trump who actively courted supporters using racism.
Hitler used our system of oppression with the Jews, he just took it to the next level. South Africa studied our history and used our own tactics of division and segregation to maintain white power. The one thing that the US has been consistent with is racism. We practice it and we export it. None of us are innocent.
7
Of course northern states did have slavery...
2
A shameful past, being re-enacted. But, unfortunately, justice today for the horrors of the past seems too little too late for comfort.
5
Southern newspapers virtually celebrating the public executions through lynching and burning of black men is very important, but it is only part of the story.
Newspapers, and later radio and television, across the south were truly "white media": they were owned by whites, the reporting was by whites and they followed the racist instincts of the times, even long after things began to change and racial hostility became more muted.
In sum, newspapers had to bend first to slavery and then to its long, ugly aftermath of gross discrimination. Since newspapers form the backbone of civic society, serving as the basic markers for how people learn about their communities and as a springboard for involvement, southern society, and democracy, suffered. It is fair to say that the south was not allowed to be a true democracy for more than two hundred years, extending until well after the end of slavery and after the end of Jim Crow (American apartheid).
When a society is prevented from being a true democracy, the civic action and institutions that would make for vigorous debate and participation wither and die (if they are ever born). This is a fundamental problem in our present national divisions. A significant portion of our country, to this day, does not have the history and the civic "muscle memory" that provide fuel for democracy to be vital. The south was an oligarchy and has not fully escaped that past. (Which is not to say there are not problems of race elsewhere.)
12
We ought to also remember and consider the journalism around the various anti-black pogrom across the nation from the Civil War through th 1920s. Next summer is the centennial of the Red Summer of 1919.
3
I am a history buff, but I am still surprised to learn about this. I appreciate the documented examples of northern press complicity, especially the New York Times. This is vile history that should be taught in school.
18
America has quite a history of lynching people of all ethnicities. I recently watched a documentary that detailed the violence inflicted upon Chinese in the USA during the years 1848 to the early 1900's. Great numbers of Mexicans were lynched also. As child, I stumbled over a book in the local library that contained many, many photos of African Americans being lynched. Even more shocking were photos of many African Americans being burned alive at the stake. It is truly shocking, especially because we consider this to be such a great and virtuous country.
13
Everyone should at least glance through Ida Wells's pamphlet "Southern Horrors Lynch Law in All Its Phases."
Lynch mobs depended on the lie that they were a form of self-defense against hordes of black rapists just waiting to "ravage" or "outrage" white women; a lie repeated by government leaders as a way of proving their commitment to "law and order." Such is the folly of ignoring racist rhetoric. It is also telling that no lynch mobs came for white rapists.
Proving one's innocence was insufficient (see Trump and the Central Park 5). Even today, cities can barely stomach evidence proving wrongful conviction. If they tried to escape the police, they risked being shot as a fugitive in flight (even if they were unarmed). If they surrendered, the police were not beyond delivering them to a mob anyway.
As Ida Wells said, "the cry of the South to the country has been 'Hands off! Leave us to solve our problem.' To the Afro-American the South says, 'the white man MUST and WILL rule.' There is little difference between the Antebellum South and the New South." Our nation should not be deluded when leaders start talking about allowing open discrimination against certain demographics (see LGBTQ) or publicly labeling whole groups of people as murderers, rapists or terrorists (see Mexicans and Muslims). Neither should we be so naïve as to think Charlottesville was about "fine people" merely trying to preserve some statue. We all know PRECISELY what such things are about.
9
This article reinforce my belief that racism exist and nothing has changed about America!
2
No newspaperman anywhere protested lynchings anymore courageously and eloquently than the great H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun.
http://niemanreports.org/articles/h-l-mencken-courage-in-a-time-of-lynch...
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/retro-baltimore/bs-md-retro-baltimo...
See also an article by Walter White of the NAACP that Mencken published in his magazine, The American Mercury in 1929.
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/segregation/text2/investig...
12
Charles Seguin references the lynching of Italians in New Orleans, the largest mass lynching in the country. However, he does not include the headlines. The NY Times:
Chief Hennessey Avenged: 11 of his Italian Assassins Lynched by Mob.
There followed two editorials denigrating the character of Sicilians. That’s real fake news.
In “La Storia,”Jerre Mangione & Ben Morreale go into some detail regarding this, and also, the second largest mass lynching in the U.S., also of Italians.
10
This article is such an argument for maintaining the rule of law and evidence in a court of law as the only judge of wrongdoing. Biased mobs were allowed to run loose with indiscriminate lynching based solely on their bias against black people. This is why we cannot allow hate groups to gain power in our country and why we must be mindful of our own unconscious bias positions which can start to take over a society. That the supposedly truth-seeking newspapers actually supported it makes them no better than propagandists. Shameful.
3
No doubt Ida Wells would have been labeled a left wing progressive, radical provocateur, defender of ‘brutish’ criminals. A Party disrupter, not middle of the road for sure. The NYTimes gave her speech one airing, but generally held to the status quo of the day in its other coverage. I wonder if anyone asked her to...compromise on the issue of lynching...for the good of....comfort, an unrocked boat.
3
Jimmy Carter in a recent interview said the black incarceration rate had risen 700% (!) since he left the presidency. We blacks are still being lynched, and 'northern' newspapers still cover it up. NYTs reporting on police abuse has been inaccurate, insufficient, and irrelevant. And now this piece. As the kids say, SMH.
19
It looks like fake news has been around for a long time. Only now, the lynch mob is on the payroll and the victim is good government.
3
How about an article on the NYT's coverage of lynching?
There are quite a few articles listed in the NYT archives, undoubtedly lots of fodder for researchers and writers.
2
The north was just as racist as the south, just less overt and brazen about it.
Nobody should’ve been surprised at the Boston riots of the early 1970s. The north’s open-mindedness was always a self-serving myth.
10
The Confederacy (present tense) needs that equivalency from people who quite correctly identify the racists in the North before and after the Civil War.
All we should have done is to have treated Confederate slave owners and their families the way that they treated their slaves.
Think about that, Southern white boys and girls.
And especially Southern Baptists.
4
This is a testament to the beast spawned by the barbaric practice of slavery that allowed black people and others to be devalued, terrorized and inhumanely slaughtered. There is no denying that that same beast lives today and puts on a uniform to further give license to the lynching of black people. And the fourth estate remains complicit.
5
Northern newspapers preferred not to believe or diminish the savagery of Southern white mobs against blacks, even during the civil rights movement in the '50s and '60s. Remember that it was John Johnson of Ebony and Jet magazines who published the photo of Emmett Till who was lynched based on a lie by his accuser. Without Johnson's courageous decision to show the world what white hate can do, the murder would have escaped notice. There's no way the Boston Globe or Herald would have reported that story. That photo galvanized the civil rights movement and brought prominence to Martin Luther King. We all owe John Johnson a debt of gratitude for ignoring the delicate sensibilities of some readers and putting the raw truth out there, no matter how ugly it is.
35
Actually, Emmett Till was lynched because Carolyn Bryant told her sister-in-law that the teenager had asked her for a date. This was probably true. His cousins, who waited outside the store, apparently put him up to it after he bragged about having a white girl friend in Chicago. The sister-in-law told her husband, who told Bryant's husband. At her husband's trail for murdering Till, Carolyn Bryant embellished her story by saying Till grabbed her hand., but Till was already dead. Technically, Till's death was probably a murder, not a lynching, since the best evidence is that only two murders were involved. To qualify as a lynching, a "mob" has to be involved, but the mob must consist of at least three people.
The Emmett Till murder trails got widespread newspaper coverage. Life Magazine famously published a interview with the two killers, who admitted they kill the teenager, knowing that could not be tried twice for the murder. Ebony and Jet magazines informed black readers about the murder.
1
I think you mean shown the photo as the northern papers did carry the story albeit a single column.
mercy our souls generations
Awful to remember the lunchmobs aided and abetted and protected the Democrat Party. This is the reason my grandparents and parents could never vote Democrat. Because of their role in slavery, segregation and murder.
7
Re Shamrock:
First of all in the US there is no "Democrat" Party. It is the Democratic Party.
Yes the Democrats of old were the party of Jim Crow, but it was Northern Republicans who cut the deal to end the occupation of the South after the Civil War and all that happened as a result of that decision. Republican Warren G Harding joined the Klan while serving a President.
Change for the Democrats started with the Franklin Roosevelt Era- in a large part due to efforts of Ms Roosevelt who was a founding member of the NAACP. Later, Harry Truman ordered the integration of the US Armed Forces long before it was politically popular.
By the time Ike left office the Republicans had largely abandoned the African-American community as most had by then shifted loyalties to the Democrats. Credit should be given where due, and Republicans did help Democrats get the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills passed by making up for Southern Democrats who voted against them.
Then came Nixon and the Southern Strategy and later Reagan who started his 1980 campaign in Mississippi. For the GOP, it has been down hill from that point.
25
Shamrock, you're nothing but a troll, and either ignorant of history, or flat out hateful. Maybe both.
8
You must be referring to conservatives, who were then in the democratic party and now in the republicant party.
13
I've been reading "Gotham" and was surprised to learn that 15-20% of the population were black slaves in the NY area. This population grew out of the 17th century when slaves were needed to help with the growing trade with West Indies plantations. In the first third of the 18th century around NYC '...hundreds of (slaves), ..., were murdered by lynching that sometimes burned their victims alive, castrated them or cut their bodies up...' Sometimes their crime was only bad-mouthing whites.
1
Well, to be fair and consistent, we should also be reminding the world of the rape of Nanking and the Japanese experiments with biological warfare on the Chinese, which actually occurred in the memories of some people still alive today. We should remind the world again and again that Hitler and the Nazis were inspired by and impressed with the eugenics laws of the state of Virginia before embarking on their mass sterilization and systemic murder of Germany's defective citizens. These and other American eugenics laws were not rescinded until the 1970's.
We should certainly remind Americans of the exonerated war crime massacres of My Lai in south Vietnam in 1968, not 1868. There is plenty to be guilty of, to feel bad about, to make amends for. Perhaps we can mimic the Serbs and massacre thousands of people over another massacre that happened a thousand years ago. The opportunities to renew old injustices are endless. Get to work and buy more ammo.
5
Has the NYT apologized for its own bigoted comments that provided "moral support" to lynch mobs and, more generally, unfair treatment of blacks?
4
Especially love the NY Times headlines from 1863: " 300 blacks killed during Draft Riot by illegal irish immigrants"
6
No such headline appeared the NY Times. In fact, of the approximately 122 draft riots deaths, the overwhelming majority were white, mostly "rioters" and bystanders, according to Adrian Cook's Armies of the Streets, cited in James McPherson's Pulitzer Prize Winning "Battle Cry of Freedom." Too many of the dangerous "rioters" turned out to be women and children according to Cook's accounting, gunned down by the Union army and NYC police. Lynchings weren't the only violence rationalized and covered up by 19th century newspapers, including the NY Times.
1
This country may have one of the worst histories of slavery, but it also has led the way into a more integrated and international future. The legacy of bitterness between the north and south still lingers in our politics today, and we should be alert to its echoes. In many ways, it feels as if we are reliving the tensions of the civil watch now, and you can sense the nation nearly splitting in two.
Let's all take a moment to think about the things we love about this country, and ALL the people who live in it.
2
Yes, these events and portrayals are part of our history and we need to know about them. We have to be able to evaluate our history and to be aware of the past from which we have emerged.
But often these accounts are used to indict those whom we deplore today. There may be good grounds for doing so, but they are not found in historical records. The people involved in the described events are all dead.
There may be a case for institutional responsibility that obliges the present-day proprietors to make amends for past crimes committed in the name of the enterprise or government. But to extend that to the idea of individual guilt for present individuals who were not even alive at the time is often a tactic for establishing blame for current grievances.
We are all responsible for our own actions, but not those of others over whom we have never had any influence. Many historical atrocities have been committed in the name of collective guilt.
3
A recent episode of the Backstory podcast had an interesting segment about (inaccurate) reporting on lynching in the north in contrast to advocacy journalism by Ida B Wells who actually went to investigate, poking holes in the pretension to objectivity and impartiality of the New York Times of the era.
https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/behind-the-bylines
When the writing of news is dominated by people who share an identity and interests assumptions creep in that would be challenged in a more diverse media environment, in line with recent philosophy of science which sees "objectivity" as a product of a social process where error is kept in check by a variety of perspectives with a process of justification between them. Aspiring to impartial standards -- capturing truth - is good but a passionate view will often tell us something about what's missing from a more conservative perspective fooling itself into thinking its point of view is neutral.
3
Such a powerful piece.
Also, for a foreign commentator a deep insight into why racial relations in America are still so deeply damaged.
A way forward IMHO would be to have a national ‘truth and reconciliation’ like they had successfully in South Africa where all the crimes of the previous regime were discussed in a court setting and recorded and forgiven.
5
We really need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like Germany, South Africa, and other nations have done to own up to their past. It is this very inability to own up to our past that makes it so difficult to move forward together. We need white racists to stop dehumanizing their fellow Americans... and see them as people. The best way to do this is to confront them so that it is inescapable to hide the wrongs. Put statues to slavery, lynching, slave heroes, etc alongside those of Confederate war memorials. They belong side by side. We can't just hear one side of the story any longer. This article reminds us that while most lynchings occurred in the South, the North was by no means free of guilt.
We need a national recognition to lynching. Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative did just that with the Memorial for Peace and Justice. The NYTimes wrote about it. We need to visit it. We need to own it.
https://eji.org/national-lynching-memorial
19
It's obvious to me that this endless stream of anti white NYT editorials is leading up to a future pitch for "reparations". Otherwise, what would be the point? Anyone, including you, is free to contribute their own "reparations", and you are free to purchase land all over the US and pay to have any kinds of statues you want built on that land. But you aren't free, so far, to force the rest of us to contribute, to travel to view the statues, or to agree with all your viewpoints.
4
I agree wholeheartedly. Additionally, There should be a national federal holiday commemorating the emancipation proclamation.
Our national history of brutality toward black Americans - during and after slavery, as well as first Nations peoples, is a national shame.
3
Although we humans have made some progress toward "civilization" and being "civilized," the urge to do despicable acts when we believe we are righteous remains just beneath the surface. Once we conclude that someone is evil, we easily justify evil in return. For example, many still believe that torturing a human being is more than justified because they are convinced that the right ends await: good evidence to stop a terrorist attack (even though few, if anyone, has seen credible evidence that torture has prevented harm; the public at large just assumes that a handful, at most, of governmental officials are persuasive about the efficacy of torture). Many thought, and no doubt many still do think, the best way to address the evil committed by an evil doer is to eliminate the evil doer. Thus, the urge for the death penalty remains. We have not moved as far away from lynching as we might like to think.
6
The death penalty signals that we value INNOCENT human life, therefore we value predators' VICTIMS and their families. Ever notice how death penalty opponents, never mention their beloved murderers' victims? That omission reveals much about them. Also interesting that when NYT publishes columns advocating de facto euthanasia of seniors and the disabled, solely because they are elderly and disabled, not one death penalty opponent ever objects. So much for the "sanctity of human life".
1
me,
You conveniently forget that thousands of INNOCENT people have been sentenced to prison or death. DNA has proven the fallibility of our "justice" system.
I have always abhorred State-sanctioned killing in my name for revenge. I was relieved when Maryland finally abolished the death penalty for a life without parole.
Last night I watched 1957's "No Down Payment", thinking it would be kind of a soap/window in time look at the 50's suburbs. (I had not read its basis book by John McPartland.) There is a scene where a Japanese man is asking his boss to help him bypass the exclusion rules so he may buy a home in the suburb where he works. Boss hems and haws, yet has a high-ground position by the time he discusses the situation with his wife, who presents some toothless arguments that would not be PC to state publicly today.
The husband ends by saying "What good is the church if it can't teach a person to lend a helping hand to a human being who really deserves it? What else is the church for?".
I still do not understand the concept of white supremacy. It must be that it is taught by word and example when the child is too young to have critical thinking skills (rarely fostered by our schools--too time-consuming) or the capacity to speak out and push back. I hope we continue to move forward, albeit slowly, in our move toward equality.
18
It's disturbing to hear our President utter a lot of the same sentiments. He speaks in headlines torn from that past era of brutality and racism.
21
A common post-Civil Rights Movement myth is that segregation, prejudice, and injustice was a "Southern thing." Depending on your definition of The South, racial persecution was practiced from Boston to San Francisco. Growing up in the 1960s in Baltimore, I was very aware that blacks were not allowed to go to Baltimore City public pools, Gwynn Oak amusement park, or the Buddy Dean daily dance show on local TV. The most racist observations of people's words and behaviors, by far, were in my family's small town in Central Pennsylvania, where a person of color could not be found because there weren't any. In my experience, they were openly and blatantly racist as a matter of culture and principle.
9
So many in my area were card carrying KKK decades ago. A Catholic High school on a hill in Pottsville was the site of a cross burning. So the South was not the only one guilty of bigotry and hate despite not allowing or tolerating blacks living near us.
3
This not about race - This is about the Confederate Slave States and their desire to perpetuate slavery as an institution together with the nonsense that the Civil War was about 'States Rights' or trade tariffs.
The premature end of Reconstruction led directly to the result we have today, thanks to the Dixiecrats who became Republicans after the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. Failure to treat Confederate slave owners as they had treated their slaves has allowed them to perpetuate the mythical magical thinking the nation suffers from now.
Stop simply calling them racists. They are the Confederates, and they need to be called out for what they are. Traitors to the United States.
19
You are really oversimplifying and have missed the point of this article. I agree that Reconstruction ended too early and way too abruptly, but your theory lets Northerners off the hook way too easily.
When I was a teenager in the early 1960s in the Northern city of Dayton, Ohio, we may not have had lynch mobs but we had segregation to the extent that one of the civil rights demonstrations I remember first hand was a group of African Americans "defiantly" singing freedom songs while riding the escalator in the city's largest department store where they were excluded as customers. Dayton was far from unique amongst Northern (non-Confederate) cities in that and similar segregation. Residential neighborhoods were completely segregated. White people could and sometimes did shop in stores in black neighborhoods but not vice versa. Of course law enforcement was - how to put it? - uneven.
11
The Democrat Party who ruled the South for 100 years played no role? Amazing
1
I hope this fellow's book in progress reflects more comprehensive reading of "northern newspapers" than indicated by these highly selective headlines, as horrifically bigoted as they are. Also, I never heard of "The Brooklyn World."
There were literally 1000's of small newspapers all over America in the late 1800's. They came and went quickly.
3
The laudable actions of the Montgomery Advertiser will no doubt spark a back-and-forth between thin-skinned whites who turn a blind eye to racism, and some on the left who feel that people should feel shame for the uncontrollable actions of their ancestors. What I hope prevails is neither. The focus of this should be on how we use this experience to move forward together to a better place. No person should be held accountable for the actions of their ancestors; but by the same token we should all be willing to condemn those actions, and quite possible recognize some of our ancestors as monsters.
8
I arrived in Maryville, Missouri in 1970. The custodian in the Fine Arts Building was only too happy to regale me with the story of a lynching that occurred there in the late 1930s. It was Missouri’s last one.
6
Thank you for this piece. The press should not just apologize, but investigate, expose & try to understand its role in this holocaust. The problem that press coverage tends to have, from lynching to the Iraq invasion, is that instead of positioning itself as the adversary of the powerful--including of course of the power of its audience's assumptions--, it instead views power as lending it credibility. The closer the relationship between the press and the powerful people they cover, the more dependent the press on ingratiating its audience, the less able tit is to question the prejudices, assumptions & motivations of the status quo. The press is, thankfully, much less tolerant of racism than it was 75 or 100 years ago. But its complicity with the powerful on other issues, such as military violence abroad, manufactured news by the political parties & media, corruption of the political process, attacks on the rule of law by political parties, etc, is as bad today as ever.
8
The current incumbent in the White House is working in the same manner when he incites his crowds to chant "Lock Her Up;" or, when he demeans football players for protesting police brutality by suggesting that they should "not be in this country." The shame is that this shameful history is ever present with us. Perhaps it will never go away.
9
Any sense of security we gain by looking back over 100 years is false. These were our great great-grand mothers and fathers. As much as we would like to pretend otherwise, we are no different from them. They succumbed to ignorance and bigotry, and so do we.
Society has made progress, but I think that our nature is far more plastic than we would like to admit. Those that say differently the loudest, are often the most shameful. And we have another NYT story today saying “Voters have been struck from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican neighborhoods,” the study found. “Neighborhoods that have a high proportion of poor, African-American residents are hit the hardest.”
10
This is a history of horror. The information/report should be expanded to include other races especially since more whites were lynched than any other group. The difference is they were murdered as individuals and not as representatives of a group nor as the victims of state allowed terrorism.
4
Whites were not lynched more than any other group. Only about 27% of all lynchings were of white people, cattle thieves mostly out West.
2
"...and not as representatives of a group," - Don't know if I agree with this, as my understanding is that some white victims of lynching were targeted for their involvement in labor organizing.
Immigrants, particularly Italians, were also targeted.
Carl H.'s comment characterization that whites who were lynched were "cattle thieves" sounds unbelievably simplistic.
Check out NAACP site: http://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/ .
Not only northern newspapers, but northern-based businesses that profited from both slavery and Jim Crow-era laws. In particular, northern-headquarted banks and railroads - to name just two - enabled both northern and southern-based "slave-based" businesses to thrive and prosper.
8
America started as a slave nation, grew to be the largest slave economy in world history, fed 620,000 of our young men into a meat grider in an attempt to absolve the sins of the past. But racism is alive and well in America.
10
As Bryan Stevenson, author of "Just Mercy" and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative has said, "Slavery didn't end in 1865, it just evolved." It evolved into Jim Crow, lynching, red lining, segregation, disparate outcomes in health care and education, economic disparities, poverty, violence, and all kinds of discrimination at every level of our society and culture. Those things are institutionalized and systemic, supported by the media and politicians who just don't care. I am a white, retired English teacher, and am now a consultant who works with organizations on how to bring more equity and inclusion into the workplace. For me to be successful in any way, to have any impact at all, it is absolutely essential that I understand the full impact of our history on communities of color today. To do otherwise would make me a hypocrite.
15
To continue. Following the end of the Civil War, there was no plan to integrate freed slaves into society. The racist flames were fanned and attention directed at the employment of former slaves in preference to Civil war widows with children to support and in preference to returning Civil War veterans. It became a one-sided war over jobs, ignoring the fact that the former slaves needed to survive and integrate into the economy. A similar war was being waged against the Chinese in the West. Groups like the KKK became "moral" police to suppress perceived economic and later, political competition.
6
The modern day counterpart to the Northern press approval of lynchings seems to be the way in which our local media reacts to stories of police killings of blacks. One can be assured that immediately after the report of such a police killing, local media will inundate the medium with stories of kind and wonderful anecdotes of police officers. It always happens as sure as night follows day.
9
I agree with this piece. Much of the coverage he's talking about was in the years after the Civil War. But more recently, FDR did not support legislation to ban lynchings. That was around the 1930s. I realize you are focusing on press coverage of lynchings, but now we have president who says there are good people on both sides following a White Nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville. We don't have lynchings - we just have police who beat up minorities and we put people in jail for life. And Trump says black athletes should not call attention to it. Instead, they have to pledge alliance or maybe they should leave the country.
93
Police "beat up" people who are a danger to themselves or others. Like any citizen, police officers have a right to defend themselves, and I want them to continue to have that right, because I want them to continue to protect me, and other law abiding citizens.
You cannot discuss the role of Northern newspapers without explaining the impact of the Peace Democrats. A Northern phenomena, the Peace Democrats, a.k.a Copperheads, were a sizeable movement that wanted the North to sue for peace and end the Civil War. Copperheads were often business owners and bankers, that had been profiting from trading and lending money to the South, prior to the War. Throughout the North were many prominent newspapers and journalists, collectively referred to as The Copperhead Press, sympathetic to the cause. They produced the most racist and terrifying articles, warning of the dangers that would follow the freeing of slaves, for the purpose of influencing Northern sentiments and elections. this was a strictly Northern phenomena found in major cities in the East and Midwest. There are large quantities of material archived online by universities for historical study. The Old Guard was a Copperhead publication produced in NJ and NYC. I believe copies are archived online at the Univ. of Michigan. Booth, who killed Lincoln, likely held Copperhead sympathies. It is interesting to note that the South wanted nothing to do with the Copperheads.
21
Chernow’s excellent biography of US Grant makes clear the pervasiveness of racism, not only among the Copperhead Democrats but also among many Republicans. That party, newly born, was an amalgam of anti slavery and free soil Whigs and nativist Know-Nothings. After the civil war many of them quickly abandoned the freedmen to their fate at the hands of the former rebels.
18
phenomena: plural, phenomenon: singular. See me.
4
Fewer African Americans were lynched in the North than in the South because the North had a very small black population during the Lynching Era. As they moved toward abolition, Northern states enacted laws to reduce their free black populations. For example, Massachusetts in 1788 prescribed flogging for non-resident blacks who stayed more than two months. New Jersey in 1786 and Connecticut in 1784 prohibited blacks from entering the state to settle. Following emancipation, freed slaves were not allowed to vote, marry whites, file lawsuits, or sit on juries in most Northern states. Pennsylvania and Ohio required white and black student to attend separate schools. In Ohio, whites often attacked and destroyed black schools. Many Northern cities enacted “black codes” designed to harass or expel free blacks. Cincinnati required its black residents to past $500 bonds guaranteeing good behavior or leave the city within 30 days. Indiana, Illinois and Michigan also established bond requirements ranging as high as $1,000 to prevent free blacks from entering the states. Through the North, white mobs attacked and burned black neighborhoods. In New York City, white union thugs drove freed blacks from the skilled and semi-skilled positions they had filled under slavery and white mobs attacked and burned black neighborhoods.
47
Thank you for your comment. We have a very “sanitized” version of slavery and its aftermath in this country and do a poor job of teaching about this period of our history. For the most part, kids are taught “North good. South bad.” I’ve been reading more deeply on the subject as of late and have been amazed at many of the practices of the northern states that have not been exposed to the general public.
4
Those who enacted and perpetuated such decisions had children and grand-children and great- and great-great, down through U. S. history. What became systemic racism is still present and serves as an often-unspoken but just as deadly a reality. The neural reflexes that cause some to see people of color as "outsiders", frightening those who consider themselves "normative" into calling police when people are walking, speaking Spanish, turning on car engines or waiting for friends in Starbucks -- we are never far from this phenomenon erupting everywhere in this country.
9
Don't forget Oregon, which passed a law forbidding blacks to reside here, own property, or enter contracts.
20
Racism has existed concurrently in the north and south, de facto in the north and de jure in the south. In the 1920's Detroit boasted 35,000 Klan members, and Chicago 50,000. While lynching was almost entirely in the south, atrocities occurred everywhere and without general outrage.
It's way past time for the country to face its racist history and its ongoing racism. Our racism is submerged, camouflaged by subtle laws and stratagems. alive and well under the surface.
We must be put face to face with racism. It must be called out. Black Lives Matter, the NFL players taking a knee, the recently-opened lynching museum in Montgomery, the AF-AM museum in DC, the Civil Rights Museum in Atlanta, and countless other examples are a start
Consciousness is being raised slowly. Perhaps our youth are our best hope for eradicating our national bane. Relentless courage and sacrifice are required, as is the conscience of our national press.
Thank you for this article.
69
Land of the free, and home of the brave? Sure, anything you say.
13
Anyone who is willing to face the truth of this horrific chapter in our history should read Leon Litwack's "Trouble in Mind," a meticulously documented history of the Jim Crow era, and its Pulitzer- and National Book Award-winning predecessor, "Been in the Storm So Long".
If you are white and realize that your own ancestors probably condoned this behavior, you have a lot of soul searching to do.
https://smile.amazon.com/Trouble-Mind-Black-Southerners-Crow/dp/03945277...
https://smile.amazon.com/Been-Storm-So-Long-Aftermath/dp/0394743989/ref=...
34
I don't have to look far back at my ancestors to see white guilt. My grandfather took my father to a lynching in Columbia Missouri when my father was only 4 years old. Not long ago my family contributed and participated in the effort to raise a memorial to the victim, James Scott, in the cemetery where he had been buried in an unmarked grave - the same cemetery where my grandparents, and the leader of the lynch mob, are buried.
10
Janna, thanks for your post. I too had a grandfather who witnessed a lynching. There must be many of us who spoke or heard of these events only within the family for decades. Maybe that can change in coming years. The museums opened recently in Atlanta and Montgomery are much needed, but I'd also like to see markers put up on the sites of lynchings, with plaques offering facts and regrets. The lynching my grandfather saw was on the Walnut Street Bridge in Chattanooga, TN. Whenever I go back there, I look at that bridge with shame.
The honor and purity of white womanhood, the eternal cover for blatant, vile race hatred. Cry, "They're rapists!" and white men rise up to protect their victimized wives and daughters, Make American Great Again.
We rarely lynch them today, but we are ingenious in harassing and causing great pain and suffering. Our latest gambit, tearing Latino babies from the arms of their mothers, as the press, including the New York Times, informs us that, yes, indeed, there have been cases of adults bringing children not their own across the border.
Complicity can be casual, banal. Lynching is always portrayed as justice by another name.
30
re: ""Yet shortly thereafter, The Times ran an editorial that, although denouncing some overzealous lynch mobs as “savages,” argued that rape, “a crime to which negroes are particularly prone,”"
Sounds similar to the Times coverage of Trump. They normalize evil in one part of the paper while glossing over the same evil in other parts of the paper.
6
When the truth of the past is horrifying to face, it takes courage to do so.
But I think its a mistake to look only at newspaper headlines, and trying to find moral guidance. Newspapers are only a mirror of the society in which they arise.
The headlines are meant to sell papers, to provide something people want, which seems to be primarily the belief in the righteousness of their own opinions and actions.
Is today's click bait alternative news echo chamber on the web really so different?
18
All Americans must search their soul and come to grips with their lynching past. Inside of all us, past and present, there is a lyncher, whether we wish to acknowledge our horrific past or not is something we must address. It was not just how newspapers covered lynchings, but realizing that the newspapers actually fed the mob mentality and encouraged lynchings and race riots in their localities. Editors, publishers, and reporters not just covered the news, but actually created the crimes that were committed that they reported. We need to come to that realization as we seek to move forward and address the crimes of the past.
14
A start, even if overdue by a couple of centuries. However, racism is well and alive in these "united states," with millions of active subscribers and even more latent subscribers who will deny the label without understanding their racism. This is the DNA of America.
26
Actually slavery was legal in the English colonies. Only after Independence did its eventual destruction begin. Thank God for independence.
2
There is only one problem with this. The U.S. abolished slavery decades after it defeated England and gained its independence and after many other countries, including England and Mexico, had already abolished slavery. Your letter indicates a refusal to honestly face our history.
12
These statements are very misleading, suggesting that it was American independence that led directly to the destruction of slavery and the slave trade (by Americans), when in fact the British abolished first the slave trade and then slavery itself in their colonies long before this happened in the US...
11
You think the British were going to defeat the Confederacy? Led by Robert E. Lee? You think Northern soldiers were going to sacrifice their lives to defeat the British South? How?
As much as race continues to divide us, it's hard to imagine how recently it could inflame our tribal instincts enough to over-rule the rule of law and make entire communities feel justified in the unjustifiable.
Now it's only religion that does that. The press should shine a bright and unwavering light on the lynchings that continue to take place in societies that consider mere printed copies of ancient texts more sacred than human life.
13
Regarding the lynching of Italians the NYT called the victims “desperate ruffians and murderers ... sneaking and cowardly ... the descendants of bandits and assassins.” Other papers write worse.
26
Yes - African Americans weren't the only people despised by white European immigrants - any one that wasn't a white European immigrant was objectionable. This is why Nazi Germany looked to the USA and it's history for lessons on promoting and maintaining the "master race" these were policies and practices perfected and nurtured HERE!
3
@Not Drinking the Kool-Aid, USA: I’m glad that you brought this up. I remember reading, many years ago, an account of an Italian immigrant who was horribly lynched in New Orleans. I was naive because I thought the only lynching victims were black. I must have been in my teens, a few years removed from the Emmett Till killing in 1955. I almost couldn’t credit that a white man would be strung up in the South. A relative told me that in the South, dark-skinned white people (Italians, Hispanics, Eastern Europeans, e.g,) were not treated much differently from black people. I have often wondered how people from these ethic backgrounds, who were willing, rabid racists in my home city of Boston, would have reacted if they had known that, in many areas of the South, they and theirs wouldn’t have been treated any differently from any black person, innocent or guilty.
4
Its worth remember that when the 11 Italians were lynched in New Orlenas, it was black and white American working together to murder the foreigners.
3
This is a very important and necessary article, and at least in my mind, reminds me of the essential nature of a free, and a fair, press, and how that an enlightened press can catalyze positive societal change.
But in today's world, the term 'press' includes Facebook and blogs and various other unedited 'fake news' sources. So far the changes in American life helped along by various 21st century internet 'news' sources are more negative than positive, in my view.
30
Yes. Hopefully this paper will take the lead since this essay appears here. It's about time. Hopefully, northern papers acknowledging their past words and attitudes will lead to more awareness in the north that American slavery was not merely a southern sin. Many of us were raised with a simplistic idea that the south had slavery and the north bravely fought against that evil. Yet, there were slaves in many northern states. Plainly, attitudes towards blacks after the Civil War were not really so very benign as many would have us believe.
65
Yes, hopefully the Times will cover the shameful 100 years of Democrat rule in the South following the election of Black Republicans during Reconstruction.
4
The NYT's job is to cover "news"; the fact that the Democratic and Republican parties used to have very different political positions than they do now is already very well known, since it's discussed in most high school American history textbooks as a key feature of the history of the US, and therefore is scarcely "news". That said, NYT articles do talk about this aspect of history very frequently, especially when the topic is race and politics.
And how those Democrats now constitute the Republican base in the south; and when you dig deep you find their motivation now is the same as it was then.
1
Montgomery is conductng a quality examination of racism. Let us hope it is an example the rest of the nation follows. The alternative is a return to when America was great.
50
I worked for nearly 20 years as a researcher at the Chicago Tribune.
One day, I came across a story on the front page—I don’t recall the exact date but the year was 1937—and the news account rather gleefully, in my estimation, went into lurid details about the “blue flames playing over the black skin” as the enraged interrogators strove to extract a painful confession from a tortured man about a rape that had been reported. I was appalled. I immediately made a copy of the story and took it to Don Wycliff.
Mr. Wycliff was a black man and, at that time, the editor of the Tribune’s editorial page. All he could do was shake his head and commiserate with me about how newspapers—even in the North—ran stories like the one referenced here.
It should be pointed out that this story was a wire piece, probably written by a United Press International staffer. The culture of the 20th Century in America was as close to South Africa’s system of apartheid as it was possible to be. Newspaper coverage of racial atrocities were heavily weighted toward the assumed guilt of the terribly murdered person(s), the general prevailing thought being that the deceased deserved a lurid death because, well, ultimately, they were expendable. Negroes, so it went, weren’t “really” American citizens, not in the context of what Sarah Palin, in 2008, and the current president of the United States, would interpret the meaning.
The Montgomery Advertiser is to be commended. They weren’t the only guilty paper.
146
From you message I infer you are about 100 years old and well enough to comment on an online newspaper. That's a cheerful image and it makes me curious to learn more about your no doubt very interesting life story!
1
NYT and WaPo: Are you listening?
2
Not sure how you deduce the age of this _researcher_ to be "about 100 years old."
1
Slavery and racism were never just a southern sickness. They were and continue to be an American stain.
That should be clearly evident in the fact that our founding document was constructed around and with full contemplation of slavery as a core element of our country. Which for me, renders the concept of a "strict constitutional constructionist" laughable at best and endorsing of white supremacy at worst.
44
Exactly. '3/5 of a man', the unequal representation in the Senate, the electoral college, and even the second amendment all owe their genesis and their 'peculiar' wording to that shameful 'peculiar' institution.
Furthermore, US history as it's taught gives short shrift to the enormous economic impact that the free labor of millions of chattel slaves had for the first 200 years of our colonial and independent existence as a nation. Economic impacts that lasted long after the end of slavery.
4
Apology isn't enough. Lynching was terrorism through and through. This sort of terrorism was expanded to Jim Crow, red lining, voting rights and every other base insult that could be thrown at American Black people. While it might be true that some white people were lynched, were they really or just hung for their crimes? The fact is that terrorism against American Black people continues to disrupt the so-called democracy we hold so high. It is curious that the graphic under the title of this article is of a Montgomery Alabama newspaper. Apology is not enough. Real change is what enough is.
32