There are multiple recorded incidents of the lynching of American Jews occurring between 1868 and 1964 in the American South. In 1868 in Tennessee, Samuel Bierfield became the first American Jew to be lynched. The lynching of Leo Frank is the most well-known case in American history. [2] The lynching of Frank is commonly perceived as the only lynching of an American Jew, despite several other known cases before and after. [3]
The vast majority of lynching victims in the United States have been African Americans. Over 4,000 African Americans have been lynched in American history. [2] Around 1,000 lynching victims have been white. Among white lynching victims, American Jews, Italian Americans, a German-American, a Finnish-American, and others have been lynched in American history.
On August 15, 1868, the merchant Samuel Bierfield became the first known Jewish victim of lynching in American history. Bierfield and Lawrence Bowman, his African-American clerk, were lynched by suspected members of the Ku Klux Klan in Franklin, Tennessee. [4]
Leo Frank may not have been the only American Jew lynched in the state of Georgia in August 1915. Two days prior to the lynching of Frank, the Jewish writer Albert Bettelheim was lynched on August 15, 1915. Little information is known about Bettelheim. [3]
In 1903, the Jewish peddler Abraham Surasky was lynched in rural South Carolina. Several weeks prior to Surasky's murder, another Jewish peddler had survived an attempted lynching. [5]
In 1925, a Jewish peddler named Joseph Needleman was falsely accused of molesting a white Christian girl from a prominent North Carolina family. A mob including member's of the girl's family broke into the jail in Williamston, North Carolina, kidnapped him, and used a knife to castrate him. Needleman survived the attack and later sued the family in federal court. [6] [7]
On September 23, 1936, the physician and activist Joseph Gelders was kidnapped and beaten by suspected Ku Klux Klan members due to Gelders' communist and antiracist activism. The people who assaulted Gelders referred to him as a "damned red" and a "nigger lover". Gelders initially survived the beating, but later died due to complications from the beating in 1950. [8] [9]
In June 1964, the Jewish antiracist activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, along with the African-American antiracist activist James Chaney, were lynched in Philadelphia, Mississippi. [10]
The total number of lynchings of American Jews is unknown. The African-American historian Tyran Stewart has referred to documentation of the history of lynchings of American Jews as "incomplete". [11]
The Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is the name of an American Protestant-led Christian extremist, white supremacist, far-right hate group. Various historians have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist group. There have been three distinct iterations with various targets relative to time and place, including African Americans, Jews, and Catholics.
The White Patriot Party (WPP) was an American anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, homophobic, white supremacist paramilitary political party which was associated with Christian Identity and the Ku Klux Klan. It was led by its founder, Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., through various organizational incarnations. In the mid-1970s, the organization was founded as the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. It was involved in the 1979 Greensboro massacre, when a confrontation between Klansmen, Nazis and communists degenerated into a shootout and a mass shooting which left five people dead and twelve people wounded. The organization became the Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1980s and it became the White Patriot Party in 1985.
Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s, slowed during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and continued until 1981. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimized ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, as the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states. In 1891, the largest single mass lynching (11) in American history was perpetrated in New Orleans against Italian immigrants.
This is a partial list of notable historical figures in U.S. national politics who were members of the Ku Klux Klan before taking office. Membership of the Klan is secret. Political opponents sometimes allege that a person was a member of the Klan, or was supported at the polls by Klan members.
Race traitor is a phrase that describes someone who is perceived to have betrayed their own race, primarily by other members of their race or ethnic group. People can be accused of betraying their race for many socio-political reasons, including miscegenation, cultural assimilation, internalized racism, supporting the interests of other racial groups, and neglecting the interests and welfare of their own racial group. Among racial minorities, the term "race traitor" is sometimes used to describe someone in a position of power that abandons or minimizes their racial identity in order to escape racial discrimination. Although derogatory, the phrase has been reclaimed by some left-wing activists seeking to abolish the concept of whiteness, notably including the political journal of the same name.
This is a list of topics related to racism:
The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) organization which is active in the United States. It originated in Mississippi and Louisiana in the early 1960s under the leadership of Samuel Bowers, its first Imperial Wizard. The White Knights of Mississippi were formed in December 1963, when they separated from the Original Knights of Mississippi after the resignation of Imperial Wizard Roy Davis. Roughly 200 members of the Original Knights of Louisiana also joined the White Knights. Within a year, their membership was up to around six thousand, and they had Klaverns in over half of the counties in Mississippi. By 1967, the number of active members had declined to around four hundred. Similar to the United Klans of America (UKA), the White Knights are very secretive about their group.
The Indiana Klan was the state of Indiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret society in the United States that organized in 1915 to promote ideas of racial superiority and affect public affairs on issues of Prohibition, education, political corruption, and morality. Like the rest of the KKK, it was strongly white supremacist against African Americans, Chinese Americans, and also Catholics and Jews, whose faiths were commonly associated with Irish, Italian, Balkan, and Slavic immigrants and their descendants. In Indiana, the Klan did not tend to practice overt violence but used intimidation in certain cases, whereas nationally the organization practiced illegal acts against minority ethnic and religious groups.
The Camilla massacre took place in Camilla, Georgia, on Saturday, September 19, 1868. African Americans had been given the right to vote in Georgia's 1868 state constitution, which had passed in April, and in the months that followed, whites across the state used violence to combat their newfound political strength, often through the newly founded Ku Klux Klan. Georgia agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau recorded 336 cases of murder or assault with intent to kill against freedmen from January 1 through November 15.
George Washington Ashburn was a Radical Republican US Senate candidate and judge assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan in Columbus, Georgia, for his pro-African-American actions. He was the first murder victim of the Klan in the state.
Wyatt Outlaw was an American politician and the first African-American to serve as Town Commissioner and Constable of the town of Graham, North Carolina. He was lynched by the White Brotherhood, a branch of the Ku Klux Klan on February 26, 1870. His death, along with the assassination of white Republican State Senator John W. Stephens at the Caswell County Courthouse, provoked Governor William Woods Holden to declare martial law in Alamance and Caswell Counties, resulting in the Kirk-Holden War of 1870.
Samuel A. Bierfield is believed to be the first Jew lynched in the United States. Bierfield and his African-American clerk, Lawrence Bowman, were confronted in Bierfield's store in Franklin, Tennessee, and fatally shot on August 15, 1868, by a group of masked men. The killers were believed to belong to a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which had emerged as an insurgent force in the state in 1866. The murder of Bierfield and Bowman was reported by both The New York Times and the Nashville Union and Dispatch.
The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a group styled after the original Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Formed around 2012, it aims to "restore America to a White, Christian nation founded on God's word".
Jim Williams was an African-American soldier and militia leader in the 1860s and 1870s in York County, South Carolina. He escaped slavery during the US Civil War and joined the Union Army. After the war, Williams led a black militia organization which sought to protect black rights in the area. In 1871, he was lynched and hung by members of the local Ku Klux Klan. As a result, a large group of local blacks immigrated to Liberia, West Africa.
Alexander Boyd was notable as the Republican County Solicitor and Register in Chancery of Greene County, Alabama in 1870 during Reconstruction who was murdered by a lynching party of Ku Klux Klan members. He was fatally shot on March 31, 1870 in Eutaw, the county seat. The Klan members apparently intended to hang him in the square in a public lynching, to demonstrate their power during this period and their threat to Republicans.
White Marylanders are White Americans living in Maryland. As of 2019, they comprise 57.3% of the state's population. 49.8% of the population is non-Hispanic white, making Maryland a majority minority state.
Joseph Sidney Gelders was an American physicist who later became an antiracist, civil rights activist, labor organizer, and communist. In the mid-1930s, he served as the secretary and southern-U.S. representative of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. In September 1936, Gelders was kidnapped, beaten, and nearly killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan for his civil rights and labor organizing activities. After his recovery, Gelders continued his activism and cofounded the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. He collaborated closely with other activists including Lucy Randolph Mason and Virginia Foster Durr. Internal injuries sustained during his kidnapping and assault led to Gelders' death on March 1, 1950.
Abraham Surasky was a Jewish-American peddler who was the victim of a 1903 antisemitic murder in rural South Carolina.
RobertChilds "Big Duck" Mallard was an African American traveling casket salesman and landowner, who was shot and lynched by a group of about 20 members of the Ku Klux Klan in Lyons, Toombs County, Georgia. The people charged with his murder were acquitted by an all-white jury.
