Violence towards AA before and after the civil war (contradiction)

There were contrasting strategies of violence towards the African American community before and after the Civil War in the Southern United States. Both periods tended to promote the same ideology; imposing the white’s rules on a race of people judged bestial, inferior. Their bodies were the element which their racism and sadism had targeted.

Before the Civil War the Afro American community was considered as properties of the white men, their bodies didn’t mean so much to the white owners but the amount of black they had at their service was all that matters. They could beat them to death but would to keep them alive to ensure the prosperity of their lands. Mary Reynolds, an Ex-slave who has undergone the barbarism of slavery at these times reported: “He hanged me by the wrists from a limb on a tree and spraddled my legs round the trunk and tied my feet together. Then he beat me. He beat me worser than I ever been beat before, and I faints dead away” (M. Reynolds 109). This slave, Mary Reynolds, has experienced the hate of those people because of their thirst of wealth and prosperity. The part of her body that was targeted to inflict the punishments was the ones she needed to produce the work in the fields. At that point, we could say that the physical punishments they received were not to exterminate them rather to teach them a lesson.   Whereas, the violence used against the black community was to keep them from being self-sufficient and multiplied their race. The extension of African American’s population in the society represented a danger for white citizens. They reinforced their rules and applied their laws through some lethal methods such as lynching and sadistic reactions. The purpose of the violence exercised towards the black community was not to make them obeying the white laws nevertheless it was to control their lives.