Lynching In Post Civil War America

Often when it came to lynching black people, “the guilt of the victims had not been proven in courts”(Litwack 8). The only thing that mattered to those performing the lynchings was to set an example to intimidate and further suppress the Black race. To further this notion Litwack states that, “Many of the transgressions by blacks would have been regarded as relatively trivial if committed by whites and were not grounds anywhere else for capital punishment”(Litwack 24). There is definite proof that these lynchings were not legal executions, but crimes in themselves; “A South Carolina editor acknowledged in 1917 that some three-fourths of lynchings were for ‘trivial offenses,’ and sometimes entirely innocent men were ‘butchered’”(Litwack 25). It was recorded that, “Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 4, 742 blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.”(Litwack 12). It is hard to comprehend the fact that our parents grew up in a time that allowed such atrocities to go unpunished. In the late 19th century and early 20th century the value of a Black mans life was considered almost worthless by white Southerners. This is epitomized in a quote from Litwack‘s paper, “’Back in those days, to k