Lynch Law in All It Phases

   Southern horrors, edited by Jacqueline Jones Roster in 1997 is the chronic of the a courageous black woman, Ida B. Wells, an African American who achieved national and international fame as journalist, public speaker and community activist. Wells dared, through her anti-lynching campaign, to bring the unspoken of the barbarous threats of whites in the southern states of a country that claimed values of equality and dignity for all in the society. She brought to paper the untold of the black and white relationship around the question of lynching. In my blog I will focus on one passage that caught my attention.

   Wells always talked of lynching with hate and never missed an occasion to tell her readers how she felt about it. Wells expressed herself on the issue of lynching that was going on in the south of the

United States in the early 1890, but one case brought her to the true meaning of such method. Her understanding of lynching began on the morning of March 9, 1892 when the bodies of three friends of hers were found shot to pieces. Those men were not charged for rapt of white women as the practice of lynching stands for. They simply owned and operated a grocery store in competition with another one across the street, owned and operated by white men. With this lynching of leading citizens of Memphis, Wells opened her eyes on the real use of lynching and argued: “Lynching was not simply a spontaneous punishment for crimes but an act of terror perpetrated against a race of people in order to maintain power and control” (Wells 3). Wells understood that lynching didn’t need a case based on evidence of guilty but was an instinct of nature nourished by the white men to “protect themselves and preserve their supremacy over the African-American. 

   Whites used such methods not to reinforce the penalty laws but to maintain the power and controlled the colored people lives. They kept these practices throughout the civil war in order to avoid any alliance that could affect their social and economic dominance. White men perpetrated the acts of terrors against African American with a specific goal: to prevent their extension in the society. By extension in the society, I mean their economic and social implication in the social life in the south. The white men implemented their practices by the belief that the white men must rule because it is a white men country. Therefore, under such oppression the black community would never attempt any revolt against them. Their supremacy would never be jeopardized.