Repairing Senate's Record on Lynching

Haunting History

Towns across America bear reminders of the shameful tradition that claimed 4,743 lives between 1882 and 1968, research shows. In Alexandria, a lamppost at Cameron and Lee streets served to lynch Joseph McCoy on April 23, 1897. In Annapolis, a bluff near College Creek was the site of Henry Davis's lynching four days before Christmas in 1906.

Lynching also remains imbedded in the consciousness of African American families, some of whom can name an ancestor or a friend who fell prey to mob justice, often meted out with spectators watching and memorialized with postcards of the victims hanging or pieces of the ropes that had snapped their necks.

Billie Holiday's best-selling record, "Strange Fruit," was about lynching. Dozens of black writers, including poets Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou, have written about it.

Locally, Rep. Albert R. Wynn (D-Md.), 53, remembers his mother warning him about the lynching tree in their small town in North Carolina. Fred Tutman of Upper Marlboro can point to a tree on his family's land that a previous owner used for lynching.

"The memories are less vivid for me because of my generation," said Tutman, 47. "They are more vivid for my mother and grandmother, who grew up in Prince George's and had all kinds of violence perpetrated on them."

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) said he was most affected by the death of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was brutally tortured and shot in Mississippi in 1955. Lewis was 15 at the time.

"I remembered thinking that it could happen to anyone, me or my brothers or my cousins," said Lewis, a civil rights activist. "It created a sense of fear that it could happen to anyone who got out of line."

Lynching touched all races and religions and occurred in all states in the contiguous United States except for four in New England. Immigrants were frequent targets, so much so that at the beginning of the 20th century, the State Department paid nearly $500,000 to China, Italy and Mexico on behalf of lynching victims.

But the practice was predominant in the South, and four out of five victims were black, according to statistics compiled by Tuskegee University in Alabama.

While some were crime suspects, many had not been accused of anything more than talking back to a white man or looking at a white woman. Black landowners were frequent targets, historians say.

Typically associated with hangings, lynching is more broadly defined as mob terrorism to avenge a crime or wrong and a method of intimidation. The goal, historians say, was not just to maim and kill, but to humiliate and dehumanize. Before they were shot or hanged, some victims had their eyes gouged out or their teeth pulled with pliers, and some were beaten, burned at the stake, dismembered or castrated.

"It was truly the American holocaust," said Mark D. Planning, counsel for the Committee for a Formal Apology, which lobbied the Senate. "There are these perceptions that lynchings were carried out on some poor souls who were dragged into the woods. But these were public spectacles. The civic fathers and leaders of the community often participated in these things, directly or indirectly."