Lynching in America - EJI

National Memorial for Peace & Justice in Montgomery, Alabama

Among the horrors of American history is lynching.

A museum opens in Montgomery, Alabama, this month to expose this dirty secret.

After lynching came its evolution into other forms of terrorism, convicting black men of crimes they did not commit and sentencing them to death.

"On May 1, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery to remember the thousands of Americans who were hanged, burned, or otherwise murdered by white mobs. The memorial sits just a short drive from the state capitol building, where three days earlier, the state of Alabama had celebrated Confederate Memorial Day, an official state holiday. It’s a city where slave traders once sold children for profit, and where slave owners would later launch a rebellion, and form a government, on the conviction that slavery was necessary, inviolable, and good. It’s the same city where, in living memory, a sitting governor pledged his total commitment to segregation in the face of an unprecedented civil rights struggle, and where—in the present—more than 30 percent of black people in the area live under the poverty line."-- from "The Pain We Still Need To Feel" by Jamelle Bouie on Slate. 

Thank you to Sonali Kolhatkar on KPFK for showcasing the story of Anthony Ray Hinton, a man who would in the past have been lynched but instead was sentenced to execution.  He came within minutes of losing his life.  His book is just out:
The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row.

Here's his story as he told it on Rising Up with Sonali on May 7: 
https://kpfa.org/program/rising-up-with-sonali/
https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/listen/anthony-ray-hinton

"They took off the white robe and put on the black robe," Hinton says. "At the end of the journey, they're still putting you to death."

As a child growing up in the 1950s, I never heard about lynching, though it continued into the 1960s.  It was too terrible to discuss.

Listen also to the story of Anthony Crawford, a wealthy cotton farmer who was lynched in Abbeville, South Carolina, in 1916.  His great-great-granddaughter, Doria Dee Johnson, traces lynching and killing of innocent men from Grandpa Crawford to Emmet Till to Treyvon Martin.
https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/listen/doria-dee-johnson

Read this book:  

Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror documents EJI’s multi-year investigation into lynching in twelve Southern states during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. EJI researchers documented 4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 800 more lynchings of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date. 

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