Chance The Rapper recently discussed lynchings in America as a thing of the present, not the past. He vowed to use his platform to shine light on Sundown towns and lynchings that continue to occur.
21-year-old Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found hanging from a tree just this past September; officials were quick to call it a suicide. His family, however, has ordered an independent autopsy as they recognize Black people do not hang themselves from trees.
“Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
“Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol and recorded in 1939 by Billie Holiday
Altogether from 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S., according to records maintained by the NAACP. Other accounts, including the Equal Justice Initiative’s extensive report on lynching, count slightly different numbers. It’s impossible to know for certain how many lynchings occurred because there was no formal tracking. Many historians believe the true number is underreported.
The highest number of lynchings during that time period occurred in Mississippi, with 581 recorded. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493.
White mobs often used dubious criminal accusations to justify lynchings. A common claim used to lynch Black men was perceived sexual transgressions against White women. Charges of rape were routinely fabricated. These allegations were used to enforce segregation and advance stereotypes of Black men as violent, hypersexual aggressors.
Lawless white mobs terrorized Black people
The NAACP defines a lynching as the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. These executions were often carried out by lawless mobs, though police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.
White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Lynchings typically evoke images of Black men and women hanging from trees, but they involved other extreme brutality, such as torture, mutilation, decapitation, and desecration. Some victims were burned alive.
A typical lynching involved a criminal accusation, an arrest, and the assembly of a mob, followed by seizure, physical torment, and murder of the victim. Lynchings were often public spectacles attended by the White community in celebration of white supremacy. Photos of lynchings were often sold as souvenir postcards.
Black people were the primary victims of lynching: 3,446, or about 72 percent of the people lynched, were Black. But they weren’t the only victims of lynching. Some white people were lynched for helping Black people or for being anti-lynching. Immigrants from Mexico, China, Australia, and other countries were also lynched.
Allegations behind lynchings
Erik Gellman, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, said after the Civil War and through the early 20th century, lynching and other forms of racialized violence became a form of intimidation amongst white Southerners, particularly to enforce and justify Jim Crow laws.
Hundreds of Black people were lynched based on accusations of other crimes, including murder, arson, robbery, and vagrancy.
Many victims of lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime. They were killed for violating social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect than what White people believed they were owed.
The Great Migration caused a shift in Black life in America
Consequently, as Black Americans fled the South to escape the terror of lynchings, a historic event known as the Great Migration, people began to oppose lynchings in a number of ways.
They conducted grassroots activism, such as boycotting white businesses. Anti-lynching crusaders like Ida B. Wells composed newspaper columns to criticize the atrocities of lynching.
And several important civil rights organizations, including NAACP, emerged during this time to combat racial violence.
The NAACP led a calculated crusade against lynching
The NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching. In the July 1916 issue of The Crisis, editor W.E.B. Du Bois published a photo essay called “The Waco Horror” that featured brutal images of the lynching of Jesse Washington.
Washington was a 17-year-old Black teen lynched in Waco, Texas, by a White mob that accused him of killing Lucy Fryer, a white woman. Du Bois was able to turn postcards of Washington’s murder against their creators to energize the anti-lynching movement. The Crisis’s circulation grew by 50,000 over the next two years, and they raised $20,000 toward an anti-lynching campaign.
In 1919, NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1919, to promote awareness of the scope of lynching. The data in this study offer the gruesome facts by number, year, state, color, sex, and alleged offense.
Among the campaign’s other efforts, from 1920 to 1938, the NAACP flew a flag from its national headquarters in New York that bore the words “A man was lynched yesterday.”
Furthermore, the campaign turned the tide of public opinion and even persuaded some southern newspapers to oppose lynching because it was damaging the South’s economic prospects.
The NAACP also fought hard for anti-lynching legislation. In 1918, Congressman Leonidas Dyer of Missouri first introduced his Anti-Lynching Bill — known as the Dyer Bill — into Congress. NAACP supported passage of the bill from 1919 onward, though it was defeated by a Senate filibuster. NAACP continued to push for federal anti-lynching legislation into the 1930s.
Modern-day lynchings
Moreover, you might think of lynchings as a disgraceful and barbaric practice from the past, but they continue to this day.
In 1998, James Byrd was chained to a car by three white supremacists and dragged to his death in the streets of Jasper, Texas. In 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot while jogging near Brunswick, Georgia. The three white men charged with killing Arbery claimed he was trespassing.
The videotaped death of George Floyd was a modern-day lynching. Floyd was killed in broad daylight by police officer Derek Chauvin, who held Floyd down with a knee on his neck for more than nine minutes.
Black families dispute “suicide” claims by officials
In 1992, Andre Jones, 18, was found hanging in a Jackson, MS jail. Officials ruled it suicide, but his family and activists alleged foul play.
In Colbert County, Ala., Dennoriss “Dee” Richardson, 39, was also found hanging from a beam in a carport at an abandoned house on Sept. 28, 2024. The county sheriff concluded suicide in January, but Richardson’s family was insistent he “did not die by suicide.”
Their suspicions were fueled by the fact that the father of five had filed a federal lawsuit earlier in 2023 alleging local police beat and abused him.
“This was made to look like a suicide,” Richardson’s wife Leigh Ann said at the time, saying her husband had a “long history of harassment” by police.
Lynchings like these should not be part of American society today just as they should not have been 100 years ago.
The family of Demartravion “Trey” Reed are currently awaiting the results of an independent autopsy report, funded by Colin Kaepernick.
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