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Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or intimidate people. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle for maximum intimidation. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in every society.
Cairo is the southernmost city in Illinois and the county seat of Alexander County.
Grenada is a city in Grenada County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 13,092 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Grenada County.
Wiggins is a city in and the county seat of Stone County, Mississippi, United States. It is part of the Gulfport–Biloxi, Mississippi Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 4,272 at the 2020 census.
Mack Charles Parker was an African-American victim of lynching in the United States. He had been accused of raping a pregnant white woman in northern Pearl River County, Mississippi. Three days before he was to stand trial, Parker was kidnapped from his jail cell in the Pearl River County Courthouse by a mob, beaten and shot. His body was found in the Pearl River, 20 miles west of Poplarville, 10 days later. Following an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the men who killed him were released. Despite confessions, no one was ever indicted for the killing. Historian Howard Smead called the killing the "last classic lynching in America."
Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and ended during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. 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 victimised 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.
William Van Amberg Sullivan was a United States representative and Senator from Mississippi.
On May 16, 1918, a plantation owner was murdered, prompting a manhunt which resulted in a series of lynchings in May 1918 in southern Georgia, United States. White people killed at least 13 black people during the next two weeks. Among those killed were Hayes and Mary Turner. Hayes was killed on May 18, and the next day, his pregnant wife Mary was strung up by her feet, doused with gasoline and oil then set on fire. Mary's unborn child was cut from her abdomen and stomped to death. Her body was then repeatedly shot. No one was ever convicted of her lynching.
On April 13, 1937, Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels, two black men, were lynched in Duck Hill, Mississippi by a white mob after being labeled as the murderers of a white storekeeper. They had only been legally accused of the crime a few minutes before they were kidnapped from the courthouse, chained to trees, and tortured with a blow torch. Following the torture, McDaniels was shot to death and Townes was burned alive.
James L. Hicks was a member of the black press from 1935 to 1977. He wrote a column for the Baltimore Afro-American advocating opportunities in the U.S. Army. Hicks covered school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas and Oxford, Mississippi, and his coverage of the Emmett Till murder trial in Sumner, Mississippi.
Ephraim Grizzard and Henry Grizzard were African-American brothers who were lynched in Middle Tennessee in April 1892 as suspects in the assaults on two white sisters. Henry Grizzard was hanged by a white mob on April 24 near the house of the young women in Goodlettsville, Tennessee.
Samuel Smith was a 15-year-old African-American youth who was lynched by a white mob, hanged and shot in Nolensville, Tennessee, on December 15, 1924. No one was ever convicted of the lynching.
John Hartfield was a black man who was lynched in Ellisville, Mississippi in 1919 for allegedly having a white girlfriend. The murder was announced a day in advance in major newspapers, a crowd of as many as 10,000 watched while Hartfield was hanged, shot, and burned. Pieces of his corpse were chopped off and sold as souvenirs.
The Newberry Six lynchings took place in Newberry, Alachua County, Florida, on August 18, 1916.
John Carter was an African-American man who was murdered in Little Rock, Arkansas, on May 4, 1927. Grabbed by a mob after another Black man had been apprehended for the alleged murder of a white girl, Carter was hanged from a telephone pole, shot, dragged through the streets, and then burned in the center of the city's Black part of town with materials that a white crowd of perhaps 5,000 people had looted from nearby stores and businesses.
Dan Anderson was an African-American man who was murdered in Macon, Mississippi, on May 20, 1927 at the age of 32. Anderson's father had also been lynched. Anderson was accused of killing T. C. Edwards, a white farmer from Cliftonville, Mississippi. He was arrested in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A mob of 300 to 500 men followed him and fired more than 200 bullets into his body.
The lynching of Henry Lowry, on January 26, 1921, was the murder of an African-American man, Henry Lowry, by a mob of white vigilantes in Arkansas. Lowry, a tenant farmer, had been on the run after a deadly shootout at the house of planter O. T. Craig on Christmas Day of 1920. Lowry went into hiding in El Paso, Texas; when he was discovered and extradited by train, a group of armed white men boarded the train in Sardis, Mississippi, and took Lowry to Nodena, near Wilson, Arkansas. He was doused in gasoline and burned alive before a mob of 500. A reporter from the Memphis Press witnessed the event, and word of the lynching soon spread around the country, aided by an article William Pickens wrote for The Nation, in which he described eastern Arkansas as "the American Congo".
This Is Her First Lynching is a 1934 anti-lynching cartoon by American artist Reginald Marsh. It shows a white crowd attending a lynching; a woman in the crowd has a young child on her shoulders, and says to her neighbor, "This is her first lynching". The cartoon was shown in one of two 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions that aimed to support anti-lynching legislation. Scholars regard it as showing a young white girl's initiation in a communal process of racist violence.
Winston Pounds was an African-American man who was lynched by a mob in Wilmot, Arkansas, on August 25 or 26, 1927.
References
- 1 2 "Elwood Higginbotham". Northeastern University Library. Retrieved August 18, 2021.
- 1 2 Gregory, Vanessa (April 25, 2018). "A Lynching's Long Shadow". The New York Times. Retrieved August 18, 2021.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Remembering Elwood Higginbottom: Speakers call for systematic change at plaque unveiling". Oxford Eagle. October 30, 2018. Retrieved August 18, 2021.