HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY Part Five: Mob rule The definition of lynching is to "put a person to death without due process of the law." At lynchings, people are mutilated, tortured, murdered and then their bodies often left to hang for everyone to see. In the first chapter of the high school history section, I pointed out that many people were lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. The klan was disbanded in 1869, and would not appear again until it was revived in 1915. But lynchings were a somewhat frequent occurrence in the South through the late 1800s and early 1900s. Why? It would be wrong to imply that the people who conducted lynchings had logical purposes in mind. Sometimes they wanted justice for something that they believed someone else had done. Sometimes they wanted to send a message to the black community that whites were in charge. And quite often many of the people who did such things were drunk or whipped into a frenzy by a political leader or demagogue. But for whatever the reason, many people were tortured and killed and many other people were terrified and haunted by what they saw or heard about at those lynchings. "When I was a little boy growing up in Mississippi, I saw a lynching," Dr. James Sullivan, who later became head of the Baptist Sunday School Board, told me a few years ago. "It haunted me the rest of my life. I would rather be lynched myself than see another one." I'm not going to post a photograph of a lynching here. Believe me when I say that some photographs exist, and they are shocking. What I've chosen to do instead is to illustrate this section with actual articles from The New York Times about lynchings that occurred in Tennessee between 1917 and 1929. If you click on these articles you will see a larger version of them, big enough to read. Here are a few important things to know about the history of this act here in Tennessee: 1. There have been lynchings throughout Tennessee history. One of the most horrible lynchings to have ever taken place occurred in Memphis in 1892, when three African-American grocers were arrested, dragged from jail and shot to death by the mob. A woman named Ida Wells became famous nationally because of her writing about this lynching. Click here to learn more about her. 2. Statistics show that African Americans were far more likely to be lynched than whites. According to historian Kathy Bennett, 2,805 people were lynched in the old Confederate states between 1880 and 1930. Tennessee had 214 lynch victims during this period, and 177 of those were black. Chicago Tribune; Dec. 22, 1934 3. Not all lynchings succeeded. Sometimes authorities stood up to the mob and turned them away. The most dramatic case of this in Tennessee took place in December 1934, when a mob tried to lynch a black man who was being tried in the Bedford County Courthouse for raping a white girl. Under orders from Tennessee Governor Hill McAlister, the Tennessee National Guard was protecting the courthouse. After repeated warnings, the guard fired on the mob and killed four people. The judge then declared a mistrial, and the guard successfully evacuated the accused to Nashville. That night the mob burned the courthouse to the ground. The occasional lynching took place in Tennessee into the 1920s (in later decades, acts of lynching abated). In the so-called "Roaring Twenties," the act was probably made more likely by the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1915 the Klan was reorganized in Georgia. Fueled on by positive publicity (such as the 1915 movie Birth of a Nation), the Klan claimed a national membership of four million people by the mid 1920s. And although every member of the Klan was by no means a lyncher (one former klansman, Hugo Black, later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice), the Klan movement certainly went against those who wanted lynchings to never again occur in America. LINKS Here are some articles in the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture that amplify this section: Ku Klux Klan Lynching Wells, Ida Click here to read about Tennessee in the 1920s.